Enabling SSL with IIS Express in Visual Studio

Enabling SSL with IIS Express in Visual Studio

IIS Express is a lightweight and tiny version of IIS for developers to run and test the web sites directly from Visual Studio.  I hope by this time you must be using it as your default development web sever as well.  Just to quick recall;  IIS Express was introduced with VS 2010 SP 1, where we used to had both Visual Studio Development Server ( WebDev.WebServer) and IIS Express. However with the Visual Studio 2013, IIS Express has been set as a default web sever .  There are several features of IIS express which you can find very useful and be used in a similar way that we does with IIS . One of the great feature of IIS express is to run your application in both default and SSL mode. You can achieve this very easily .

To enable the SSL with in IIS Express, you have to just set “SSL Enabled = true” in the project properties window.

SSL Enable for IIS Express

By default SSL enabled is set to false with IIS Express; so if you run your web application first time,  you will only able to find the default url and you can access the site over http

IIS Express Default Site Running

Once the SSL is enabled ( SSL Enabled = true)  ; you can find both the URL available in application browser window

IIS Express SSL Site

With this; you can access any of the URL from your browser and run the application.

Hope this helps.

Please let me know if you have any question or comments.

Abhijit Jana

Abhijit runs the Daily .NET Tips. He started this site with a vision to have a single knowledge base of .NET tips and tricks and share post that can quickly help any developers . He is a Former Microsoft ASP.NET MVP, CodeProject MVP, Mentor, Speaker, Author, Technology Evangelist and presently working as a .NET Consultant. He blogs at http://abhijitjana.net , you can follow him @AbhijitJana . He is the author of book Kinect for Windows SDK Programming Guide.

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