I had a file permissions problem with my hosting service provider (Bizhostnet) so I contacted them in an attempt to find a solution. Unfortunately, their solution was to make a change in the IIS7 application pool that completely disabled all the functionality that I’ve been implementing for my web site. Only the front page was working. Atom/RSS feeds, individual blog entries, the archive, the timeline, etc. all got disabled.

For those interested in the details… I make use of new functionality in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 that allows for URI-based request routing*, effectively building an MVC-pattern for handling incoming requests. For the functionality to be enabled, the Web Application needs to run inside IIS 7 in “integrated mode” (the default behavior). My hosting provider uses “classic mode” (simulating the IIS6 behavior effectively) by default. Before I made the switch to http://savas.me I was evaluating their hosting capabilities and had requested them to move me to “integrated mode”, which they did. However, a problem that surfaced just a couple of days ago (I couldn’t save new images in the filesystem from within the Web service that accepts the new entries I sent) made me contact them again. I asked them to look into the issue. Unfortunately, their solution was to move the application pool back to “classic mode”, without asking me first and without having a look at the previous support tickets explicitly requesting “integrated mode” 🙁 I only noticed the problem this morning (Sunday) so I don’t know for how long my Web application has been down.

My sincere apologies. It all works now.

* We are discussing this pattern in our upcoming Web book, which is going great!