Found the HREF EXE problem

I found that by default Windows 2003 Server has the "Expire immediately" option checked for Content Expiration. I was having problems with running HREF EXE's from a virtual directory with this option set. Once I disabled it they loaded fine.

It seems to me that with "Cache-Control: no-cache" in the response header the CLR's loader was getting confused.

Has anybody looked into this further?

(BTW - BIG thanks to Simon fell for his wonderful tool: TcpTrace)

REFERENCE DATA:

/* == IIS 5.0 == */



GET /myapp.exe HTTP/1.1

Accept: */*

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 ...

Host: localhost:8080

Connection: Keep-Alive





HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.1

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:02:42 GMT

Content-Type: application/octet-stream

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Last-Modified: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 21:48:20 GMT

ETag: "0aae7c34ee7c21:95f"

Content-Length: 110592



MZ?





/* == IIS 6.0 == */



GET /myapp.exe HTTP/1.1

Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, 

  image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, 

  application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/vnd.ms-excel, 

  application/msword, */*

Accept-Language: en-us

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 ...

Host: localhost:8081

Connection: Keep-Alive





HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Cache-Control: no-cache

Content-Length: 65536

Content-Type: application/octet-stream

Last-Modified: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 21:23:08 GMT

Accept-Ranges: bytes

ETag: "0c6ae3e4be7c21:4ae"

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 19:07:22 GMT