A quick and effective way to check whether the application is working properly is to skip IIS entirely and run it directly on Kestrel. Doing this is just as easy as opening the application root folder on the Web Server, locating the <ProjectName>.dll file, and executing it with (or without) administrative rights using the following command:

> dotnet <ProjectName>.dll

As soon as we do this, the web application will bootstrap from the command-line; once it completes, we should be able to test the application by opening a web browser and pointing it to http://localhost:5000/, 5000 being the default TCP listening port for Kestrel:

If the application completes its boot phase and starts running, the issue is most likely related to the IIS configuration and/or the ASP.NET Core module; otherwise, there's a good chance that our problem lies within the application code itself.

If that's the case, checking the Event Viewer and the aforementioned stdout logs will be our best weapons to identify and overcome the issue.