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 server instead.

Is this a good idea? What are the pros / cons of using the ASP.NET dev Server? Are there any gotchas we should be aware of?

Thanks.

NB: Running on Win XP / IIS 5 / VS2005

Edit:

Didn't realise it was called Cassini.. More answers for Cassini v IIS here.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

It's a very good idea. Here are some reasons for:

• You no longer need admin access to your machine for web development (it can still be helpful).
• It's much easier to test a quick change and continue work, and faster iteration cycles are good.
• It can simplify setup and deployment of your development environments.
• The XP version of IIS has limitation that are not present in the Server version that Cassini side-steps.

The only argument I know against is that there are a couple very rare edge cases where the Cassini built-in server doesn't exactly mimic IIS because you're using odd port numbers. I doubt you'll ever run into them, and using Cassini as the primary dev environment does not preclude developers from also having access to IIS on the machine. In fact, my preferred setup is Cassini first for most small work, then deploy to my local IIS for more in-depth testing before moving code back to the shared source repository.

[Edit]
Forgot about url re-writing. You do need IIS for that. And an example of a limitation of the built-in XP IIS is that you are limited to one site in XP (can have multiple applications, but that's a different thing).