Installing and Enabling Windows Authentication in IIS 7.5
This post is intended to be one of a series of info dumps so I don't forget any fiddly work-arounds, and may even be useful for anyone else facing similar issues.
I recently needed to build and run a web app on my Win7 dev box that required IIS to be configured to use integrated Windows Authentication. IIS 7.5 (bundled with Windows 7) has a substantially different UI from versions 5 and 6, which I'm familiar with from Windows XP and Server 2003. On older versions, this feature is a simple check box, which has been removed in 7.5.
According to my first rounds of googling, enabling Windows Auth should have simply been a matter of selecting it from an appropriate list and clicking "Enable". My problem was that it wasn't on that list in the first place.
Cue much head scratching.
In the end I found the right combination of google terms and found this invaluable post which includes sage advice for all of us:
And like any decent developer, I didn’t waste my time reading all the text on the error page and started investigating the issue
The ultimate solution was to go to the Windows Features tool, drill down into the IIS feature lists and tick the box labelled, unsurprisingly "Windows Authentication". Windows Auth should now appear in the appropriate list in IIS.
And now I can get on with actual development rather than config headaches!
