It’s an extremely common problem: you create a virtual directory to house a supporting application, but accessing it throws an exception because it is trying to initialise the httpmodules/httphanders from the root application. Attempting to them doesn’t work because the clear happens after they are added, which means they need to exist in order to remove them.
Thankfully there is a solution. Introduced in .NET 2.0, the SectionInformation.InheritInChildApplications property, when set to false, stops the runtime from even attempting to load anything from that location when in a child application (like a virtual directory).
Now, as SectionInformation maps directly to the configuration element, it means the offending sections will need to be wrapped in a . When referring to the root application, you can either leave out the path attribute or assign it to “.”
What is strange is that the inheritInChildApplications attribute is not document on the location Element MSDN page, or is it in the schema that is included in VS.NET. This would explain why its existence is not common knowledge
For clarity, I have modified the default web.config template to include the change
<!--
The section enables configuration
of the security authentication mode used by
ASP.NET to identify an incoming user.
-->
<!--
The section enables configuration
of what to do if/when an unhandled error occurs
during the execution of a request. Specifically,
it enables developers to configure html error pages
to be displayed in place of a error stack trace.
-->
