Setting Access-Control-Allow-Origin in ASP.Net MVC - simplest possible method

If you are using IIS 7+, you can place a web.config file into the root of the folder with this in the system.webServer section:

<httpProtocol>
   <customHeaders>
      <clear />
      <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*" />
   </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178685.aspx And: http://enable-cors.org/#how-iis7

For plain ASP.NET MVC Controllers

Create a new attribute

public class AllowCrossSiteJsonAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        filterContext.RequestContext.HttpContext.Response.AddHeader("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");
        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}

Tag your action:

[AllowCrossSiteJson]
public ActionResult YourMethod()
{
    return Json("Works better?");
}

For ASP.NET Web API

using System;
using System.Web.Http.Filters;

public class AllowCrossSiteJsonAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuted(HttpActionExecutedContext actionExecutedContext)
    {
        if (actionExecutedContext.Response != null)
            actionExecutedContext.Response.Headers.Add("Access-Control-Allow-Origin", "*");

        base.OnActionExecuted(actionExecutedContext);
    }
}

Tag a whole API controller:

[AllowCrossSiteJson]
public class ValuesController : ApiController
{

Or individual API calls:

[AllowCrossSiteJson]
public IEnumerable<PartViewModel> Get()
{
    ...
}

For Internet Explorer <= v9

IE <= 9 doesn't support CORS. I've written a javascript that will automatically route those requests through a proxy. It's all 100% transparent (you just have to include my proxy and the script).

Download it using nuget corsproxy and follow the included instructions.

Blog post | Source code