Does IIS7 require a web.config to serve a PHP website?

I have an ASP.NET hosting plan 开发者_高级运维with a hosting company. I've made many websites that only serve PHP (no .NET) stuff using Windows Server 2008 and I don't need a web.config in my wwwroot folder. Now, a client of mine purchased some hosting (w/same company as mine) and when I did a hello world site and tried to serve index.php, I got a 403. So I went through the control panel, updated the website's settings, and noticed a web.config was created in his wwwroot directory. If this web.config is not present, I get the 403. But my stuff doesn't have this problem. Any ideas? because I'm out

P.S. My client and I have the same web hosting company. This isn't really a big problem, but I'm just looking for some insight as to why his server requires the web.config and mine doesn't. AFAIK, we both are on Windows Server 2008, IIS7, and I've set them up exactly the same w/.NET 4.0 Integrated Pipeline, etc etc etc.

Since you don't say what the contents of the web config file are, I'll take a stab and say that the server config file on your client's server is different than it is on yours. It could be a newer or older server that was provisioned differently. The settings on your server allow the php app to run without additional configuration, but on the client's server, the defaults have to be overridden by his custom web config for his application instance to allow the php app to run.