Host Tax Balance on Windows with IIS

Owned by CBE
Last updated: Oct 25, 2024
2 min read

Internet Information Services (IIS) is a flexible, secure and manageable Web Server for hosting web apps. This guide will lead you through the installation and configuration process.

Please ensure that all Installation requirements are met.

IIS configuration

Configure IIS for Windows Server operatings systems or Windows desktop operating systems. Please refer to the Microsoft documentation for this task.

  • You may skip the section on configuring Windows Authentication

  • Please enable the WebSockets Protocol feature

WebSockets Protocol can be absent if desired. It is not sufficient to block WebSockets Protocol on client-side/browser, e.g. per Group Policy. Please ensure in IIS-Manager, that the created IIS Site has the Native Module WebSocketModule not configured.
Tax Balance application will then fallback to Server-sent events (SSE) or Long Polling for some communication scenarios between Browser and Server.

Set or create the following entry in the registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HTTP\Parameters] "UrlSegmentMaxLength"=dword:00000400

For easy administration, here is also a Powershell script, which adds this registry key :

Set-Location -Path "HKLM:\" $Path="HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\HTTP\Parameters" New-ItemProperty -Path $Path -Name "UrlSegmentMaxLength" -Value 1024 -PropertyType DWord Set-Location -Path "C:\"


You may want to use the following PowerShell script to perform the installation of the IIS feature.

Install-WindowsFeature Web-Server Install-WindowsFeature Web-WebServer Install-WindowsFeature Web-Common-Http Install-WindowsFeature Web-Default-Doc Install-WindowsFeature Web-Dir-Browsing Install-WindowsFeature Web-Http-Errors Install-WindowsFeature Web-Static-Content Install-WindowsFeature Web-Http-Redirect Install-WindowsFeature Web-Health Install-WindowsFeature Web-Http-Logging Install-WindowsFeature Web-Performance Install-WindowsFeature Web-Stat-Compression Install-WindowsFeature Web-Security Install-WindowsFeature Web-Filtering Install-WindowsFeature Web-App-Dev Install-WindowsFeature Web-WebSockets Install-WindowsFeature Web-Mgmt-Tools Install-WindowsFeature Web-Mgmt-Console Get-Website | Remove-Website Get-ChildItem -Path IIS:\AppPools\ | ForEach-Object { Remove-WebAppPool $_.Name }

Firewall Clearing

Maybe the Windows defender Firewall needs an additional clearing for the port 8443 (our standard for TaxTransferDE) and TLS:

Install .NET Core Hosting Bundle

The corresponding runtime must be available on the host system. See Installation requirements to determine whether the installation of the .NET Core Hosting Bundle is required. Tax Balance Version 24.0.95 and later does not require installing the .NET Core Hosting Bundle. For older versions download the hosting bundle of ASP.NET Core Runtime 6.0 on this page.

For more information, see Microsoft documentation.

Create the IIS site

Extract the package that was provided to you upon deployment to a folder of your choice.

Create a site on the IIS Server by following this guide. Use the previous chosen folder as the Physical path of the application.

Open the Advanced Settings and set Behavior > Limits > Maximum Url Segments to 32.

Tax Balance works exclusively with HTTPS. Create a valid HTTPS binding with a matching valid certificate.

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