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In our production environment a website runs under HTTPS with SSL terminating on a load balancer and passing traffic to the IIS servers as HTTP.

There are various in-house and 3rd party components and controls within the site and some of them use mechanisms similar to the .NET System.Web.HttpRequest.IsSecureConnection property which simply queries the HTTPS server variable to return its result. As the connection into the web server from the load balancer is HTTP, these methods return the incorrect value and cause some components to fail. For example, a component might direct the user to a HTTP URL instead of HTTPS for a JavaScript file and cause the browser not to load the mixed content.

In order to debug these components and to develop a workaround, I need to recreate this scenario on my development machine. My question is Is there an easy way to simulate an externally terminated SSL connection for the Visual Studio / IIS Express development environment?

SilverlightFox
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  • why not set a self signed ssl on iis express ? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5521305/iis-express-getting-ssl-to-work – Aristos Feb 06 '12 at 13:10
  • Because this will give anything that queries the _HTTPS_ server variable the wrong value. I need to simulate the live environment where this will be OFF. – SilverlightFox Feb 06 '12 at 14:14
  • Sorry, misunderstand. - The passing traffic is done with redirect ? or is total hardware ? Can you setup the load balancer to pass https ? – Aristos Feb 06 '12 at 15:18

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I've found a way using Port Forwarding Wizard.

Create a single TCP mapping with Listen Port set to a spare port (e.g. 443), destination as localhost with web server port (e.g. 80). Leave everything else as default, but go into SSL Encryption and generate a Root Key and Certificate in CA Center. Once done, select Enable SSL Encryption and select Server. Generate a Private Key file, Cert Req file and a Certificate and then bob's your uncle, you get terminated SSL forwarding to your local IIS Express server: Simply Start your port mapping and then connect to https://localhost with your web browser (specifying the port if it's not 443).

SilverlightFox
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  • Thanks for the tip - it works like a charm. Just remember to download the [Pro Edition](http://www.port-forwarding.net/port-forwarding-software/port-forward.html) since SSL is not included in the version available directly from your link. – jmosbech Feb 17 '12 at 14:44