When we perform automated deployment to IIS, sometimes we encounter 503 errors with following message in EventLog
Trying to read configuration data from file ‘\\?\<EMPTY>’, line number ‘0’
As a solution, I opened the command prompt (not PowerShell) as administrator and executed following commands
- net stop WAS /y
- rmdir /s /q C:\inetpub\temp\appPools
- net start W3SVC
This resolved the error
