Browsing '.svc' Files yields HTTP Error 404.3

Version: Dynamics AX 2009.

Problem

You have published your Dynamics AX services as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) web services through Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), running on Windows Server 2003 or on Windows Server 2008. When you try to browse files with the extension '.svc' you get an error message of type 404.3 with a description similar to "The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration".

'.svc' files are WCF service artifacts; they are similar to '.asmx' files used in older web service implementations. You can browse '.svc' files for instance by pointing your browser to a URL similar to https://myhost/MicrosoftDynamicsAxAif50/CustomerService.svc; please refer to the product documentation for details about determining the actual URL for a specific service.

Possible Cause

I ran into this issue on test machines where I had installed IIS after installing .NET Framework 3.0, 3.5 or Windows SDK for Longhorn Server. It turned out that WCF - and the file extensions it supports (including .svc) - had not been registered properly with IIS and ASP.NET.

Solution

I used the ServiceModel Registration Tool (see [1]) to reregister WCF with IIS and ASP.NET and ran it on the machine to which I had deployed my Dynamics AX web services. The command options that worked for me were:

ServiceModelReg.exe -i -x

Note that this procedure is also documented in the IT Pro documentation.

Related Links

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms732012.aspx