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

Just update Visual Studio, this is the simplest solution that worked for me.

Answer 2

I solved this just now, in the system tray (bottom right) you can click ion the IIS icon and stop the current site, then it allowed me to run.

Answer 3

Additionally to Bruno's answer I ended up registering the same port for localhost. Otherwise VS2015 was giving me Access Denied error on server start.

netsh http add urlacl url=http://localhost:{port}/ user=everyone

May be it's because I have binding for localhost in aplicationhost.config also.

Answer 4

This happened to me on Windows 7 and VS 2013 while viewing a project on the browser after build. I only had to close the browser "Chrome" then made sure that the port is not in use in my Network Activities using some utility then tried again and worked without any problem.

Answer 5

I fixed the problem with deleting .vs folder on project folder.

• Close VS projects.
• Delete .vs folder on project folder that includes applicationhost.config file.

VS will generate new config for this project.

Answer 6

For me I tried a few of the above - run as administrator, check firewall.

For me it was the IIS Express configuration. A little bit of a "just get it working" fix without much investigation, but deleting the folder IIS Express is located under

C:\Users\UserName\Documents\iisexpress

Not sure what caused the issue for my VS2013 - but I am constantly flipping between VS2013 sites in IIS and IIS Express.

NOTE: When I forget to run VS2013 as Administrator, my Local IIS project gets inserted in the IIS Express applicationhost.config file, which fails to open the web project. Which is really frustrating.