ASP.NET MVC Routing vs. Reserved Filenames in Windows

Answer 1

Since asking the question, I've found that the bug is in ASP.NET proper, not IIS or ASP.NET MVC, meaning that there's no way to work around it. The only solution is to manually forbid URLs matching these names and these names followed by a period and random characters.

Answer 2

For a similar reason, there can't be a web.config tag in StackOverflow.

http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/1722-general/suggestions/98871-web-config-tag-404-error

Answer 3

for another similar reason you can't have urls with a dot and a slash http://stackoverflow.com/questions/294495/semantic-urls-with-dots-in-net

Answer 4

This has been addressed in ASP.NET 4. http://haacked.com/archive/2010/04/29/allowing-reserved-filenames-in-URLs.aspx

You can apply a setting in web.config that relaxes this restriction.

<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <httpRuntime relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true"/>

    <!-- ... your other settings ... -->
  </system.web>
</configuration>

Hope that helps.