ASP.NET Web Development Server

Question

Can someone explain how the ASP.NET Web Development Server work? I don't have IIS installed on my development machine. So Visual Studio 2008 is debugging my web app project in the built-in web server. I want to know where do all the files get deployed to for debugging. Is there any folder similar to \inetput\wwwroot? Thanks.

Answer 1

The web server is an executable file named WebDev.WebServer.EXE and located in \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727. When debugging the web site, Visual Studio starts up an instance of the application with the following parameters.

WebDev.WebServer.exe \port \path [\vpath]

This ASP.NET Development Server simply uses the compiled web application in the debug folder, which is provided as /path, to serve the website.

You can read more about this here.

Answer 2

Do a search for a folder called "Temporary ASP.NET Files". This is where files are precompiled and temporarily deployed/stored for the development server (Cassini) to serve them up.

On my machine, the directory is C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files, and it is currently over 260MB.