IIS Set Up Windows XP

IIS on XP Professional is limited to 10 connections (XP Home = 5 connections). This is often sufficient to enable local testing using a network. The number of connections can in fact be increased to 40 by using a tool from Microsoft named MetaEdit to change the LM/W3SVC/MaxConnections entry data to 40.

This document will show you how to setup IIS for Windows XP from scratch.

Go to Control Panel and Click Add/Remove Windows Components

Select Internet Information Services (IIS)

Click Next

You may be asked to insert your Operating System CD Rom

Windows will copy all the necessary files.

When Windows has installed all the needed files you will see the following screen

We then go back to the Components Wizard, select Internet Information Services (IIS) again and then click the Details button

Check the following boxes and click OK

Click Next


Check the boxes as shown below

We can now click OK twice and then Finish

We are now ready to Configure IIS

Go to Control Panel and Click Administrative Tools

Click Internet Information Services Shortcut

Select “Default Web Site” and right click New then Virtual Directory

The Virtual Directory Creation Wizard then opens.

Click Next


Enter a name for the new directory

Click Next

Browse to C:\Inetpub\wwwroot, click Make New Folder then enter the folder name.

Click OK

Click Next and the Access Permissions page opens. Click Next

The last page of the Wizard opens. Click Finish

Select the Directory you created then right click Properties

The Properties Page will open. Click Directory Security

This is where we setup who can access our application. Click Edit

Click Browse

Click Advanced

Click Find Now

We can now select the user name. In the Select User box you will see the built in users.

By default, the IUSR_<computername> account is included in the Windows user group Guests. This group has security restrictions, imposed by NTFS permissions that designate the level of access and the type of content available to public users.

I am going to select the builtin ASNET account.

Select OK, Apply and then OK again

We are now ready to test our application.

As it is on the same physical PC I will use the Publish option in Visual Studio

Use the Browse function to select the directory. Select Local II then the folder

Click Publish

Please note that Publish sometimes screws up and the web.config file ends up in the wrong directory.

As a minimum we should have a bin directory and the web.config. If you are using images the Resources folder is also required.


We can now open a browser and enter the URL

I have chosen to use the extension .ASHX instead of the VWG default of WGX.

This saves a lot of setting up and if you use a hosting service saves problems getting the hosting service staff to set up WGX correctly.