ASP.NET: This method cannot be called during the application's pre-start initialization stage

Question

I'm trying to get an ASP.NET MVC 3 site running on IIS 6.0.

Currently when I request a page from the server it gives the following error:

Parser Error Message: This method cannot be called during the application's pre-start initialization stage.

on this line:

<add name="MyMembershipProvider" type="NS.MyMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="MyDatabase" applicationName="/MySite"/>

I'm completely stumped and don't have much of a clue about the ASP.NET application lifecycle, let alone the differences between 6.0 and 7.0. Reading through the MSDN pages on it hasn't seemed to help much.

Does anyone have any insight or any good links for investigation? :)

I have the same issue with MVC 2 on the VS localhost webserver (Cassini). — Morten Christiansen, Jan 11 '11 at 15:08
This same problem (and resolution) appears to be applicable to MVC 3 on IIS 7.0 as well. — CrazyPyro, Apr 19 '12 at 20:38
Also have this problem with MVC4 & IIS6, with a new project. Fixed by removing webmatrix.*, see below answer. — Andrew, Nov 08 '12 at 10:24
I had the same error, but not in the context of a membership provider, so the accepted answer was no help. Turns out I'd made a stupid mistake, not specifying the assembly in the configuration section. I changed the section name to "fully.qualified.name.of.type, assembly.name" to clear the error. — FishesCycle, Oct 21 '13 at 22:52

score 254 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 22 '13 at 11:57

254

Add this in your web.config (in the appSettings section):

<add key="enableSimpleMembership" value="false"/>
<add key="autoFormsAuthentication" value="false"/>

EDIT:

For the ones who ask why, it is a known issue described in the mvc 3 release notes More details here

edited Mar 22 '13 at 11:57

Hugo Domingues

5
3

answered Jan 13 '11 at 16:14

Gregoire

24,219
6
46
73

3

Can you please expand on that a little? Where in the web.config? What do the keys do? I'm having trouble finding online documentation of those keys. – Kennet Belenky Jan 19 '11 at 19:54
@Kennet Belenky : In the appSettings section – Gregoire Jan 20 '11 at 12:52
2

I see. It automatically defines security and membership rules so you have to override them before you add custom ones. Tricky. – Jonathan Allen May 25 '11 at 08:46
4

I create a new project, this error does not occur, and I do not need to add these keys. On my existing project, I had to add these keys to work, why?? – ridermansb Jul 08 '11 at 15:41
2

Why? Can someone please link to some explanation/documentation? – Matt Kocaj Feb 14 '12 at 07:37
Worked a charm, but like the others - I'm after an explanation! – Chris Haines Feb 24 '12 at 17:33
I've literally spent the entire day searching for an answer... Two simple statements in the Web.Config did the trick.. Thank you so much. – Preetham Reddy May 06 '12 at 22:16
1

The first line fixed it for me in MVC4: – angularsen Oct 11 '12 at 09:07
I was getting this error from providers being added within the `` tags and this suggestion did *not* work. Not sure what the workaround actually is as disabling healthMonitoring was the only solution that worked for me. – atconway Oct 15 '12 at 19:50

score 40 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 13 '12 at 14:48

40

After upgrading some of my applications from ASP.NET MVC3 to MVC4 I was getting this error. It was a result of the WebMatrix assemblies (WebMatrix.WebData.dll and WebMatrix.Data.dll). I removed those references and assemblies from the /bin directory and that took care of the issue.

answered Sep 13 '12 at 14:48

Justin Helgerson

24,900
17
97
124

2

@rboarman - This has fixed it for me repeatedly. Are you sure the assemblies are not still sitting in the /bin directory? – Justin Helgerson Oct 31 '12 at 13:33
Adding the key as described above fixed it. The presence of WebMatrix.WebData.dll and WebMatrix.Data.dll didn't make a difference either way. – rboarman Oct 31 '12 at 17:06
This fixed it for me when I upgraded from MVC4RC to RTM. I started out by making a fresh project and copying over all the related bits. I made no code changes, and the web.config had no significant changes either. Strange. – Andrew Nov 08 '12 at 10:24
1

Fixed it for me. I was in a situation where I installed a few things for Azure, built the project, decided that wasn't what I wanted and did an undo through TFS, so all my code was IDENTICAL to what it was when it was working. However, my bin folder was a bit heavier. Clearing the WebMatrix assemblies out manually (as opposed to calling Clean on the project) worked. Thanks Ek0nomik. – Yetti Dec 06 '12 at 19:50
This fixed it for me also. These references are added by the MVC4 NuGet package but it looks like they are not necessary when publishing. – Isaac Llopis Jan 07 '13 at 12:49
I'm still having this problem (stuck on an old MVC) -- where are the assemblies coming from? – drzaus Oct 17 '18 at 13:31

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 12:04

@Ek0nomik is right. We migrated from the MembershipProvider to the new ExtendedMembershipProvider allowing us to take advantage of some of the new functionality offered in the WebMatrix namespace. By default Simple Membership is enabled for some reason so we had to disable it explicitly since we didn't want to go as far as using the SimpleMembershipProvider.

All we had to do was add this to the web.config:

<add key="enableSimpleMembership" value="false"/>

Having Simple Membership enabled caused the Provider initialisation code to execute before the Application_Start handler. Our app structure requires App_Start to be the first thing to execute. Personally I would always expect this but Simple Membership changes this behaviour. Beware.

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 01 '12 at 00:04

Well, I just got this error, and it resulted from having accidentally copied a .cshtml into the root of my project. It wasn't even included in the project. Deleted that and the error went away. This was with MVC3 on IIS7. I imagine some of the people getting this problem are in the same boat.

score 2 · Answer 5 · edited Nov 17 '16 at 02:46

This is caused by any of a number of Reflection calls being made too early in an Application. It just so happens the Web.Config suggestions in other answers prevented one such Reflection call from being made. In my case however:

I'm using Entity Framework, and ran update-database. I got:

This method cannot be called during the application's pre-start initialization phase.

As it turns out we had code that used a library which was recently modified to get all code in all namespaces/projects. Specifically, it called:

System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetReferencedAssemblies()

Kaboom. That caused this obscure error. EF Migrations run in a weirdo zone where the application is half running and half not, meaning the above method can never be called by any code Migrations would call on.

ASP.NET: This method cannot be called during the application's pre-start initialization stage

5 Answers5

Linked

Related