I spent a large proportion of yesterday trying to debug why a website I was trying to publish wasn't working..
Upon copying the folder there, and converting it to an application, we browse to the site and lo, nothing there. Not a sausage... Just a blank page.
Hours on this..
Is it the web.config? - ahh no.
Is it the configuration of the server? - ahh no no.
Let's try again, create a new folder... add in a 'Hello world' html page
Browse to: Success!
ok, Convert to application - Browse to: Failure!
Turns out that IIS (in this case 7) allows you to convert / add an application to the server using the 'Default App Pool' even if that app pool doesn't exist. So - changing the app pool to the correct (and by that I mean one that exists) one, and now it all works...
Surely some kind of warning - "oh by the by - that app pool doesn't exist - are you sure you want to use it?" would have been in order?
grrrr