Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Resolve read configuration data from file ‘\\?\’, line number ‘0’ issue in IIS

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

  1. net stop WAS /y
  2. rmdir /s /q C:\inetpub\temp\appPools
  3. net start W3SVC 

This resolved the error