Quickly enabling SSL security in your ASP. NET applications with Visual Studio 2012 (and a bunch of other stuff, too)

When developing (and testing) your web applications, you often want to tune a setting or two so that your work is a bit more efficient until you go into production. For instance, you might wish to temporarily circumvent application security to be able to easily see UI changes you've made to a certain protected page. Or, you might wish to use Windows authentication or disable SSL security requirements while writing new features.

In many cases, you'd go to your application's web.config file and edit your settings there. And with ASP.NET 4.0's web.config transformations you could make this process pretty painless. However, if you are using the new IIS Express as your local web server (compared to the previous Development Server or "Cassini"), Visual Studio 2012 gives you nice little additional options for configuring IIS settings comfortably within Visual Studio.

This is how to do it. First, open a web application project (such as an ASP.NET MVC 4 project), and then select the project (the "second" level node) in Visual Studio's Solution Explorer. Next, take a look at the properties window: it displays handy shortcuts to configuring IIS Express on your local machine.

The settings are:

• Always Start When Debugging (true/false)
• Anonymous Authentication (enabled/disabled)
• Managed Pipeline Mode (integrated/classic)
• SSL Enabled (true/false)
• URL

The last URL property is read-only, but it's handy when you need to quickly find the web address of the local site. Sure, you can find this in many places, such as from the project's properties window, or by running the app, but this one is a handy location nonetheless.

Happy hackin'!