ASP.Net portable server

Question

I'm trying to start on a new project to help enrich my asp.net knowledge, since I'm not completely satisfied with what my class is teaching me. From my (very little) experience with Rails, I recall every application containing its own development web server. Say I were trying to create a local-only application, but I want it to run in a web browser (Therefore ASP.Net). Are there any options in terms of being able to distribute an application and have it launch its own, or just not require IIS/VS/Apache-mono?

Answer 1

You may want to look into aspNETserve. It sounds like it would fit your needs. I haven't worked on it recently, so it probably has some rough edges.

On the plus side its all open source, and if you are just getting started with ASP.NET it would be a real eye opener on how the internals of the ASP.NET lifecycle operate.

Answer 2

The simple answer is that you need a web server to run the application. It cannot run without one.

If we're talking demo purposes or you don't require that many features of a web server there are redistributable web-servers that you can include with your setup package. Like Alex mentioned the most popular one seems to be Cassini.