HTTP Error 403 (Forbidden) when using ASP.NET MVC 3 on IIS 6

If you are trying to get an ASP.NET MVC 3 page running on IIS 6 - in my case I tried it with the great MVC 3 based CMS Orchard - and hit this 403 error when trying to open the web site the first time, here's a possible solution:

ASP.NET 4 comes with a new feature that makes extensionless URLs work out of the box in Internet Information Services 6. This feature can be enabled in the registry. It should be enabled by default, but in my case, it was not for some reason.

So, make sure that in:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\4.0.30319.0

the EnableExtensionlessUrls key is set to 1.

This entry was written by Bernhard König, posted on Thursday, April 28, 2011. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. You can post a comment.

1 comment for “HTTP Error 403 (Forbidden) when using ASP.NET MVC 3 on IIS 6”

  1. Gravatar of DaveDave
    Posted Wednesday, November 09, 2011 at 3:59:15 PM

    That's awesome. Too bad I have to have EnableExtensionlessUrls set to 0 for other applications on the server. Reason #6 to move on to Sitefinity...

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