IIS Express - Turning on Windows Authentication

So I brought up a new machine and tried to run my ASP.NET web site in IIS Express that uses Windows Authentication and was greeted with the following error:

Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Details:

This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault=“Deny”), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode=“Deny” or the legacy allowOverride=“false”.

Solution

Every time I bring up a new machine I always forget to update the IIS Express setting to fix this error and have to do a google search to figure out where the IIS Express configuration is stored. So I figured I should finally document the fix for it.

The error is caused by this section in the web.config

<system.webServer>
	<security>
		<authentication>
			<windowsAuthentication enabled="true" />
			<anonymousAuthentication enabled="false" />			
		</authentication>
	</security>
</system.webServer>

To fix this open up the IIS Express applicationhost.config. This file is stored at C:\Users[your user name]\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

Update for VS2015+: config file location is $(solutionDir).vs\config\applicationhost.config

Look for the following lines

<section name="windowsAuthentication" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />
<section name="anonymousAuthentication" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />
<add name="WindowsAuthenticationModule" lockItem="true" />
<add name="AnonymousAuthenticationModule" lockItem="true" />

Change those lines to

<section name="windowsAuthentication" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />
<section name="anonymousAuthentication" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />
<add name="WindowsAuthenticationModule" lockItem="false" />
<add name="AnonymousAuthenticationModule" lockItem="false" />

Save the file and refresh your asp.net web page. It may take a moment to load as it load the new configurations into IIS Express.