HTTP Error 500.31 is rather unhelpful

Is there an existing issue for this?

[X] I have searched the existing issues

Describe the bug

I've been developing a .NET 6/7 WebAPI site and ran into a HTTP Error 500.31 error when hosting the site in IIS.

more specifically IIS reports this error page:

HTTP Error 500.31 - Failed to load ASP.NET Core runtime Common solutions to this issue: The specified version of Microsoft.NetCore.App or Microsoft.AspNetCore.App was not found.

The ACTUAL problem i had, was that the Web.Config was referencing an incorrect DLL :

the 500.31 error suggest that the framework installation on the host machine is to blame, which sends the developer out on the wrong direction of problem solving.

Expected Behavior

I would expect a better error message, that the Path of the DLL (the argument) is incorrect.

It shouldn't be that hard for dotnet.exe to tell me that the argument is wrong.

Steps To Reproduce

Spin up a new .NET 6 WebAPI site in Visual Studio 2022
Add Web.Config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>
            <add name="aspNetCore"
                 path="*"
                 verb="*"
                 modules="AspNetCoreModuleV2"
                 resourceType="Unspecified" />
        </handlers>
        <aspNetCore processPath="dotnet"
                    arguments=".\INCORRECT-NAME-OF-DLL.dll"
                    stdoutLogEnabled="true"
                    stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout"
                    hostingModel="inprocess" />
    </system.webServer>
</location>
</configuration>

Add new Site in IIS
Point to the /Bin/Debug/.NET6.0/ folder
Start up the site
Access the /Swagger page
Be met with a HTTP 500.31 error

Exceptions (if any)

No response

.NET Version

6 or 7

Anything else?

No response

dotnet / aspnetcore