IIS Express stores its configuration settings in the %USERPROFILE%\Documents\IIS Express\config\applicationHost.config file which eliminates the need for administrative permissions for changing it. As a consequence when you uninstall Visual Studio, the webserver configuration remains in the user’s profile folder.
It may happen, that you uninstall VS 2012, install VS 2013 and then when you create a new web application it behaves very strange, for example it asks for Windows authentication every time. This may be caused because you have created a website with the same name earlier in IIS Express, and its settings are preserver in the configuration file.
If you often create new web applications in Visual Studio, it is a good practice to clean up IIS configuration once in a while. Because there is no GUI for IIS Express, you can edit the applicationHost.config file directly or you can use the command line.
You can find the appcmd.exe for IIS Express in the C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express folder. You can use it to list the websites:
C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express>appcmd list site SITE "WebSite1" (id:1,bindings:http/:8080:localhost,state:Unknown) SITE "MyProject" (id:2,bindings:http/*:44441:localhost,https/*:44300:localhost,state:Unknown) SITE "WebSite1(1)" (id:3,bindings:http/*:44468:localhost,state:Unknown) SITE "WebSite2" (id:4,bindings:http/*:44465:localhost,state:Unknown)
If the names of the websites do not tell too much, then you can list the virtual directories, because that list shows the physical paths as well:
C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express>appcmd list vdir VDIR "WebSite1/" (physicalPath:%IIS_SITES_HOME%\WebSite1) VDIR "MyProject/" (physicalPath:W:\Projektek\MyProject) VDIR "WebSite1(1)/" (physicalPath:W:\Temp\WebSite1) VDIR "WebSite2/" (physicalPath:W:\Desktop\WebSite2)
You can even give them meaningful names by renaming them:
C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express>appcmd set site WebSite1(1) -name:Master SITE object "WebSite1(1)" changed
And you can delete the sites you don’t need any more:
C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express>appcmd delete site WebSite2 SITE object "WebSite2" deleted
I learned it. I share it. 