IIS 6.0 suddenly shows directory listing instead of MVC 3 app

Question

Over night an (internal, luckily) MVC web application has stopped working for me, without anything being changed as far as I know. The application itself absolutely hasn't been tinkered with in the last two days and the same goes for IIS.

The problem is that I get a directory listing of my www-folder instead of the applications default action (/Home/Index).

My www-folder contains the standard stuff:

bin
Content
Scripts
Views
Global.asax
Web.config

I have tried:

• setting a "Specific Page" as Start Action but it doesn't solve the problem.
• restarting the web page in IIS
• enable/disabled "default content page" in IIS. Doesn't help, but IIS does pick up on a Default.html if I place it in the www-folder.

Now, this has happened once before. At the time I was on vacation and it was solved by restarting the entire World Wide Web Publishing Service. While it might work this time as well, I'd rather figure out the root of the problem before temporarily fixing it just to have it happen again further down the road. So while a WWW Publishing Service restart might get the site running again I'd rather understand why it happened in the first place before fixing it this way.

Finally, note that I'm running other MVC apps on the same IIS server and have never gotten this problem with them.

Answer 1

1. Open Command prompt
2. Go to C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\<version> folder.
3. Run aspnet_regiis -i

That's all!

Answer 2

A little late.... But as I was receiving the same result.

My Application Pool was targeting the wrong .Net version (should be same as web app Target Framework). Simply adjusted within the "Set Application Pool Defaults" option, restarted and it was solved.

Hope it helps someone.