This week I encountered a tricky MOSS Problem. I wanted to deploy a standalone web-application in the MOSS root-dir. I messed around with the web.config of the standalone application, but it did not work as expected because it inherited settings from the root web.config. Finally I’ve tried to edit the root web.config of MOSS. My big mistake was that I used the IIS ASP.NET config-section in the web-app properties dialog.
The strange thing is, that the IIS config-section adds a namespace declaration to the web.config file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><configuration xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0"> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="SharePoint">
This namespace declaration causes MOSS to display nice error messages:
“File Not Found”
This is quite strange, because this is not a HTTP 404 error page, but just content-type plain/text – “File Not Found”. After some Google research I came across this blog-entry:
http://home.infusionblogs.com/kguenther/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1829
According to the blog-entry, removing the namespace declaration solves the problem!
Lessons learned: Never change settings via the IIS ASP.NET config-section – always use VIM