No more IIS7 WCF REST 404 Error!

Recently I’ve been trying to host a WCF REST .NET 4.0 service in IIS7. I downloaded the template for VS2010 used for creating REST services. Running the sample application found on that website worked fine from VS2012. I then switched to hosting the service in IIS7. The result however was a 404 error, not exactly what I was hoping for. I tried on other computer the same thing on his machine with complete success. I looked at the service configuration, IIS7 settings, among other obscure settings without success. Google wasn’t especially helpful since most of the results kept saying things like “add an *.svc file” (which is not required/used in .NET 4.0 REST services), others mentioned changing an IIS7 handler mapping so that the *.svc file would not be required, but none of these solutions helped. Tracing didn’t help me get any closer either.

Still the problem felt like a server issue, so I tried to narrow the search. I eventually came across this blog. There was a link to a question on the MSDN forums that mentions a handler mapping named “svc-Integrated-4.0″. When I looked at my handler mappings in IIS7 it did not contain that mapping. The last post on that question contained a link to the MSDN post One-Time Setup Procedure for the Windows Communication Foundation Samples explaining some steps that need to be taken in order to use the .NET 4.0 WCF services in IIS7.  I followed all procedure that I found on this last link and it’s run. The problem was a wrong installation of Asp.net.

That’s all!