Using port 80 with IIS Express inside of VS2010

Nick Albrecht picture Nick Albrecht · Apr 15, 2011 · Viewed 26.1k times · Source

I've got an app that I am trying to run on my dev system under IIS Express from VS2010 that I need to use port 80 for, but I can't get it to work. I've looking up information talking about port 80 being reserved. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/1005/handling-url-binding-failures-in-iis-express/

But even after doing that I still get an error from vs2010 that says "Unable to launch the IIS Express Web server. Port '80' is in use."

I don't know what else to try. I've used Process Hacker to track down port 80 and it seems to be used by System running on process ID 4, which is the NT Kernel and System process. I don't know if that would prevent me from using the port though. I thought maybe that was a result of http.sys holding that port so nothing else could use it?

I did managed to get IIS Express to run on port 80 by modifying the default binding of the C:\Users\[MyUser]\Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config file, and while I can start IIS Express manually this way, VS then gets an error because a binding already exists on that port. So I change it back to 8080, create the virtual directory using the button within VS2010 (which I'm guessing is the same as entering a site binding) but I still get an error when I go to debug the application. Is there something hardcoded in VS2010 that won't let it start IIS Express on port 80?

UPDATE & FIX: Ok, so I found a few more things to check and I did resolve my problem but not completely. One post suggested making sure I did not have SQL reporting services installed as it can monitor on port 80, I used to have it installed but not anymore and was not the problem I was encountering. I did however realize that I have WebDeploy installed. It was bundled with the VS2010 SP1 bundle from the Web Platform Installer. This is fine as I do want the client tools from WebDeploy, but it also installed the agent on my system which was monitoring on port 80. I went to my list of services and stopped the Web Deploy Agent Service. Soon as I did this I can now use port 80 for IIS Express from within VS2010.

New Issue related to running on port 80 in IIS Express However my application is an MVC3 App, and I've run into a problem because the MVC3 isn't capturing my request at all, so It's not firing my controller actions or anything like that, but a txt file in the root of my app can be reached so I know it's my site that IIS Express is serving up. Anyone have any issues running an MVC3 (I don't know if it's exclusive to MVC3 or not) in IIS Express on port 80?

Answer

Nick Albrecht picture Nick Albrecht · Apr 21, 2011

Just posting my own answer for this problem so I can mark the question as answered. Check http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/1005/handling-url-binding-failures-in-iis-express/ Disable the Web Deploy Agent service if you have it installed.