How to solve “Microsoft Visual Studio (VS)” error “Unable to connect to the configured development Web server”

Question

PROBLEM

If you start using \"Microsoft Internet Information Services Express (IIS)\" from \"Microsoft Visual Studio (VS)\" you may get when you run

Answer 1

I just encountered and resolved this in VS2013 on Windows 7. It is a Web Application Project that doesn't use SSL. But when I examined the Properties Window (F4), SSL was enabled. Setting SSL to false resolved the issue.

However, when verifying before posting this answer, turning it back on did not cause a recurrence of the problem. So it might be that anything that writes to that preferences resolves the problem, rather than the details of what was written.