MVC 4 POST fails to bind model with IIS 8 in Windows Server 2012

Question

I am migrating a MVC 4 web application that used to run under IIS 7 (Windows Server 2008 R2), to IIS 8 (Windows Server 2012).

I have a situation where a plain GET returns our initial unsecured page, but a POST with username and password fails, seemingly due to the MVC model not binding the form contents correctly (it raises a null reference exception on the line that the first property of the model is accessed). I'm pretty sure I've upgraded and installed everything that I need on my server, so I'm at my wits end.

Has anyone seen a similar problem or have any suggestions or ideas what could be going wrong?

Answer 1

Ok, turns out that the problem was the machine key that we used to encrypt/decrypt connection strings in the web.config file for the site. In addition to copying the SSL Certs, we needed the the machine key used for RSA encryption.

(Not a very helpful error message at all.)