How to restart IIS Express in Visual Studio?

Question

We are currently intensively customizing applicationhost.config files in our Visual Studio solutions to activate additional host header hosts.

Is there a way to quickly restart IIS Express from Visual Studio without having to start a debugging session? Changes to applicationhost.config are only accepted after a restart.

Answer 1

You can close it in the taskbar or kill its process in the task manager and start it again, you just need to use iisexpress exe, usually it is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exeor C:\Program Files\IIS Express\iisexpress.exeif you use 32-bit Windows.