"The page cannot be found" Error With ASP.NET On Windows Server 2003?

When you have installed ASP.NET on Windows Server 2003, you may receive the following 404 - Page Not Found error:

The normal html pages can be accessed normally but the aspx pages will give this error. Visual studio.net 2005 has inbuilt server hence you would normally not face this issue since you would not really be using IIS. But in case you deploy the application in IIS and try accessing the application using the localhost or 127.0.0.1, you are bound to find this error.

This error is caused as the IIS 6 disallows the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Service Extension. To fix this, follow these steps:

Open up the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager (which you find under Administrative Tools)

Expand your server

Select Web Service Extensions

In the right hand pane, click ASP.NET v2.0.50727 (or a later version number) and then click the Allow button.