WCF – Browsing svc file – HTTP Error 404.3

Recently,at office, our laptops were replaced by new Sony VAIO with Vista Business SP1. So today when I hosted WCF service in IIS 7.0. I got an error like

HTTP Error 404.3 – Not Found
Description: The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) map policy that is configured on the Web server. The page you requested has a file name extension that is not recognized, and is not allowed.

Solution:

What is intuitive here is that .svc extension is not recognized i.e. Http handler of .svc is not defined 🙂 So the solution I found was that:

Start –> Run –> optionalfeatures

And you will notice that WCF HTTP Activation and WCF Non-HTTP Activation both are unchecked, so all you have to do is to check both these items and click ok. Windows will take few minutes to update and after that your WCF Service will run smoothly on Vista and IIS7.

I just faced that problem today, so I thought it will be great to share with other developers or perhaps it can be used as reference in future for myself as well.