ASP.NET: This method cannot be called during the application's pre-start initialization stage

Question

Add this in your web.config (in the appSettings section):

<add key="enableSimpleMembership" value="false"/>
<add key="autoFormsAuthentication" value="false"/>

EDIT:

For the ones who ask why, it is a known issue described in the mvc 3 release notes More details here

After upgrading some of my applications from ASP.NET MVC3 to MVC4 I was getting this error. It was a result of the WebMatrix assemblies (WebMatrix.WebData.dll and WebMatrix.Data.dll). I removed those references and assemblies from the /bin directory and that took care of the issue.

@Ek0nomik is right. We migrated from the MembershipProvider to the new ExtendedMembershipProvider allowing us to take advantage of some of the new functionality offered in the WebMatrix namespace. By default Simple Membership is enabled for some reason so we had to disable it explicitly since we didn't want to go as far as using the SimpleMembershipProvider.

All we had to do was add this to the web.config:

<add key="enableSimpleMembership" value="false"/>

Having Simple Membership enabled caused the Provider initialisation code to execute before the Application_Start handler. Our app structure requires App_Start to be the first thing to execute. Personally I would always expect this but Simple Membership changes this behaviour. Beware.

Well, I just got this error, and it resulted from having accidentally copied a .cshtml into the root of my project. It wasn't even included in the project. Deleted that and the error went away. This was with MVC3 on IIS7. I imagine some of the people getting this problem are in the same boat.