Can't get the OWIN Startup class to run in IIS Express after renaming ASP.NET project file

1
votes

I've got a situation where I needed to change the solution and project names within a OWIN-based WebAPI website. Everything worked great before this change, and to my knowledge the renaming was successful because of the following:

  1. The solution builds fine and all my unit tests run sucessfully both locally and on our TeamCity build server
  2. The application runs fine on our test server (full IIS 8) and in production (also full IIS 8)

My issue is that after this rename I can not get the Startup class to execute when I run this in IIS Express no matter what I try. I suspect there is some cached folder that contains multiple Startup class on my machine because in our test environment I needed to remove all the old DLLs that were using the previous name before things started working.

I know Startup isn't executing because I have breakpoints in it that are not firing (and in fact are not enabled because VS doesn't see the symbols loaded):

enter image description here

Here's what I've tried thus far:

  • Uninstalled IIS Express 10.0 (I have VS 2015 RC on my dev machine), clean out all IIS folders, then re-installed IIS Express 8
  • Cleaned out all temp ASP.NET folders on my dev machine
  • Cleaned out all obj/bin folders within my own solution

In my case I'm specifying the Startup class using the following in my Startup.cs:

[assembly: OwinStartup(typeof(Startup))]

...but again, this all worked just fine before I tried to renaming the solution and projects. I don't think this is a general IIS Express problem either because I can successfully run other OWIN-based solutions locally (e.g., our implementation of IdentityServer3) without issues...although that solution didn't require any name changes.

Is there some other aspect of using IIS Express that might get tripped up by changing the name of a solution or project file?

For reference I have already examined the following possible causes (without any luck): - OwinStartup not Starting ... Why? - OWIN Startup Class Missing - ASP.NET Temporary files cleanup - OwinStartup not firing

2
asp.netasp.net-web-apiowiniis-express
Try navigate to Startup class in OwinStartup attribute using F12. – tia
@tia - It resolves to the class shown in the image above (i.e., the expected class). Note, I only have a single Startup class in this solution. – Sam Storie

2 Answers

3
votes

While I can't fully explain why this solves the issue, I was able to fix this by changing my projects to build to the regular bin/ folder.

I apologize for not mentioning this in my original question, because I didn't think it was relevant, but I had previously changed my ASP.NET project to build to bin\Debug and bin\Release depending on the configuration. This seemed to work just fine, but caused this issue once I changed the name of the projects.

2
votes

I know this is old, but just wanted to add that I ran across this using a custom template. In my case I had a working solution with a startup, made it a template but the template didn't work.

Come to find out, it was because the new project had a space in its name. So adding 

[assembly: OwinStartup(typeof(myProjectName.Startup))]

to my existing startup file fixed it.