Using Razor without MVC in VS 2013 and 2015 - razor

Question

A web project was created in VS Pro 2013 on Windows Pro 8.1, on which a non-MVC Razor page was placed. The .cshtml page could be viewed correctly in IIS Express and in local IIS (8.5).
The project was loaded in VS Pro 2015 on another Windows Pro 8.1 machine but failed to render in either IIS Express or local IIS. The following error was displayed:
The type of page you have requested is not served because it has been explicitly forbidden. The extension '.cshtml' may be incorrect. Please review the URL below and make sure that it is spelled correctly.*
Could this be due to a difference in the build output from 2015 vs 2013, or due to an overlooked difference in webserver configuration (given that IIS Express behavior parallels local IIS)? What could account for the problem?
Addendum
I have found that VS 2015 added a file to the solution named .vs\config\applicationhost.config (folder was added at solution level). Too big to include the whole file here, so I can only show bits of it. Could any of this be relevant to the problem?
<add name="cshtm-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*.cshtm" verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
<add name="cshtml-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*.cshtml" verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
<add name="cshtm-Integrated-4.0" path="*.cshtm" verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG" type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
<add name="cshtml-Integrated-4.0" path="*.cshtml" verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG" type="System.Web.HttpForbiddenHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
<add name="StaticFile" path="*" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule,DefaultDocumentModule,DirectoryListingModule" resourceType="Either" requireAccess="Read" />

Answer 1

The project was created as a website, not as an MVC project. It seems to be problematic serving cshtml files directly in either IIS or IIS Express. Once converted to an MVC project, it all worked properly. That it ever worked seems to be due to some tenuous support for cshtml built into IIS, which isn't really guaranteed outside of a web application.
The Visual Studio templates don't really lend themselves to a gentle learning path - too bare in some ways, too overwhelming in others. After some trial and error, I've worked up a few samples which I hope will be more helpful for newbies:
https://github.com/Zenilogix-Carl/Samples