Should the IIS Express be installed automatically or I should be installing it separately?

Question

I have installed VS 2012 Professional Edition.

I have set my Web Application to use IIS Express:

<UseIISExpress>true</UseIISExpress>

But it complains that "The IIS Express applicationHost.config file contains invalid entries and must be corrected before you can use it."

Should the IIS Express be installed separately or automatically when VS 2012 gets installed?

How to resolve this?

Answer 1

Man I was pulling my hair out dealing with this. Started happening after installing Update 2 but only for web projects. I repaired, uninstalled, reinstalled VS2013 but I kept having the same problems.

Ended up renaming the file C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v4.0.30319\\Config\\web.config to web.config1 as a backup and I was able to load my project. Try renaming / deleting this file.

edit: it loaded the project but would get an error when I tried to debug or build. Ended up copying the C:\\Windows\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v4.0.30319\\Config\\web.config from my work PC to this one. Works well now.