Can't get the OWIN Startup class to run in IIS Express after renaming ASP.NET project file

Question

I\'ve got a situation where I needed to change the solution and project names within a OWIN-based WebAPI website. Everything worked great before this change, and to my knowl

Answer 1

While I can't fully explain why this solves the issue, I was able to fix this by changing my projects to build to the regular bin/ folder.

I apologize for not mentioning this in my original question, because I didn't think it was relevant, but I had previously changed my ASP.NET project to build to bin\Debug and bin\Release depending on the configuration. This seemed to work just fine, but caused this issue once I changed the name of the projects.

Answer 2

I know this is old, but just wanted to add that I ran across this using a custom template. In my case I had a working solution with a startup, made it a template but the template didn't work.

Come to find out, it was because the new project had a space in its name. So adding

[assembly: OwinStartup(typeof(myProjectName.Startup))]

to my existing startup file fixed it.