Accessing a WCF service and seeing the SVC file instead?

At least 3 developers have approached me recently with a very common issue when hosting a service via WCF. They follow all the steps in the sample to get the simple 'Hello World' service working – but when they browse to the SVC file to view the Contract information, all they get is a the contents of the SVC file displayed on the browser as plain text!

This problem is clearly outlined here but just to summarize, this is normally caused by a missing IIS mapping for the .SVC file. If you follow the steps outlined in the link, and re-create the mapping between SVC files and the aspnet_isapi.dll you will be up and running in no time.

It's always the little things …