IIS Express -- HTTP Error 401

I recently reinstalled my development workstation and ran into an strange access denied issue when I tried to debug an MVC application that I had worked on previously without issue. No matter what I did, I continued to receive an access denied message any time that I tried to access the application.

After doing some research on the Internet, I realized that my application uses Windows Authentication and IIS Express seems to disable this by default:

<windowsAuthentication enabled="false">
  <providers>
    <add value="Negotiate" />
    <add value="NTLM" />
  </providers>
</windowsAuthentication>

The simple solution to this problem is to change the “enabled” attribute to true…