ASP.NET Web API - PUT & DELETE Verbs Not Allowed - IIS 8

Question

I recently upgraded from Visual Studio 2010 to the Visual Studio 2012 RC. The installer also installs IIS 8 Express which Visual Studio now uses as the default web server.

Answer 1

Okay. I finally got to the bottom of this. You need to jump through some hoops to get the PUT and DELETE verbs working correctly with IIS8. In fact if you install the release candidate of VS 2012 and create a new WEB API project you'll find that the sample PUT and DELETE methods return 404 errors out of the box.

To use the PUT and DELETE verbs with the Web API you need to edit %userprofile%\documents\iisexpress\config\applicationhost.config and add the verbs to the ExtensionlessUrl handler as follows:

Change this line:

to:

In addition to the above you should ensure WebDAV is not interfering with your requests. This can be done by commenting out the following lines from applicationhost.config.

Also be aware that the default Web API convention is that your method name should be the same as the invoked HTTP verb. For example if you're sending an HTTP delete request your method, by default, should be named Delete.