ASP.NET Development Server or Localhost IIS?

Question

Currently our dev team set up all the websites they\'re working on in IIS on their local machine. We\'re thinking of switching to using the built in ASP.NET development serv

Answer 1

As I stated here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/103785/what-are-the-disadvantages-of-using-cassini-instead-of-iis your developers need to be aware that Cassini runs as the local user, which is typically an admin account for developers. The development will be able to access any file or resource that their account can, which is quite different from what they will see on an IIS 6 server.

The other thing that's a pretty big gotcha is debugging web services is much easier using IIS and vdirs rather than separate Cassini instances.

Answer 2

I have run into the following limitations with the asp.net dev server:

1. does not support virtual dirs. If you need them in your app, IIS seems to be your only choice

2. Classic asp pages dont run in dev server. So if you have a mixed web app (like I have at my client right now), IIS seems to be the solution

3. If you need an admin UI to configure settings, IIS works better

Of course IIS requires that you be a local admin.

Answer 3

I've used both methods and I prefer having IIS locally vs. using the built-in server. At very least you're more consistent with the final deployment setup.

Answer 4

Another distinction I noticed is that Cassini runs as a 32-bit process and you have no control over it, whereas you can control the application pool of your IIS app to disallow 32-bit (assuming your IIS is running on a 64-bit server). This becomes especially important if your web application is going to call APIs in 64-bit processes such as SharePoint Foundation/Server 2010. When you debug your web app with Cassini as your debug server, you'll get "The Web application at url could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly" type errors when instantiating objects. If you debug using IIS with the app running in an app pool that runs as 64-bit with an identity that allows access to sharepoint database then you'll be able to debug properly.

Answer 5

Also, when using IIS 5.1, be sure to get JetStat IIS Admin, it adds functionality that is disabled out of the box on IIS 5, such as being able to setup multiple sites.

Answer 6

There is nothing that the ASP.NET Dev WebService can do that IIS can't (You can set breakpoints etc, just attach the VS debugger to the ASP.NET runtime).

However, the ASP.NET Dev WebService does not represent a true production environment, and as such you can get caught by gotchas that you wouldn't expect when you deploy to production.

Because of that, I mandate that all development is done using IIS on a local machine. It doesn't take much work to configure a site in IIS.