IISExpress serves empty pages when Visual Studio 2013 has the web project open

Question

As soon as I simply open my Asp.net MVC 3 project in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, IISExpress starts serving up zero byte pages. That is, the content-length is 0 and the request body is empty. Close VS, and the pages are served up correctly.

I typically launch IISExpress myself from the command line. It serves up my application no problem. Once I open my project in VS 2013, suddenly empty pages are served up. Http response code is 200. I can still attach and then debug/step through. I see my controllers grabbing data and my views building html. But empty http requests are all that is served up. As soon as I shut down VS, it serves up the correct pages again.

If an action throws an exception I do get the yellow screen of death, as expected.

Note that VS need not be attached to cause this behavior, simply running with the project loaded is adequate to reproduce.

I have removed anything I know of that might be invasively hooking into the asp.net runtime like Glimpse and HibernatingRhinos EF profiler. This does not change the behavior.

I have also killed the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.Host.exe process. Does not change the behavior.

I'm not sure how to proceed with debugging this problem. Any ideas?

Answer 1

From the description of the problem it is clear that VS is somehow intercepting your request to IIS Express. As confirmed, VS is not attached to IIS Express process, so it is unlikely that any changes are done on the server side.

There is another possibility though. The interception could be done on the browser side. VS 2013 has presented us with Browser Link functionality, enabled by default if I am not mistaken. Read here more on Browser Link and see point 4 of the article for the instruction how to disable it.