Skip to main content

What is the difference between ASP.Net Development server and IIS?

When you are developing web application using .Net, you have three options for development web server.

1. Visual Studio (2008/2010/2011) has built in development server
2. You can install local IIS (XP Professional/Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate)
3. You have a dedicated development Windows server.

You can use any of above three options if there are only few developers in your organisation. However in an enterprise level development, you may want to coordinate code deployment to common development server to avoid overwriting each other’s code.

So that leaves with first two options.

Option 1 is good if there are restrictions in your organisation on what are allowed to install and you are developing and testing pages at page level. However there are some drawbacks of using ASP.Net development server you must consider.

1. Security Context: By default ASP.Net development server runs in local users security context which has more privileges than a context in which a IIS server or local IIS runs. This means the applciation running in ASP.Net development server may have more permissions to resources like files, registry, database or even code access security. Often you find that these application fail when deployed to IIS server.
Also if you are administrator on local machine, ASP.Net development server will run under elevated administrator privileges.
2. Reduced features: ASP.Net Development server is a trimmed down version of IIS and does not support all features. For e.g. you cannot use, Server.Transfer in ASP.Net development server.

So a local IIS is the best option for developing web applications locally on developers machine as it closely mimics the live environment.

Comments

Richard Byrdk said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
21 December 2012 at 13:32
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why there is semicolon at the start of a JavaScript function?

Very often while reviewing the code for my team, I will come across a semicolon at the start of JavaScript function as show below ; (function () { 'use strict'; ...and I often wondered what purpose it served. Guess what. It is an insurance to make sure your script works fine when all other scripts are merged together;  The leading ; in front of immediately-invoked function expressions (iffe) is there to prevent errors when appending the file during concatenation to a file containing an expression not properly terminated with a ;. So there you go. Now you know what that little semicolon is doing there in your code.
3 comments
Read more

C# Performance Improvement - The Power of StringBuilder

 Often when we are wring code we don't think about performance and go with the default options available to achieve a task. String concatenation is one such scenario. If you are doing simple and few string catenations, then you can use the following result = string1 + string2; string1+= string2; result = String.Concat(string1,string2); String.Format and string interpolation are few other options.  However when you are performing large and repetitive  operation, string catenation can be expensive. Here is an example to prove the point.  As you can see it took 41 seconds to perform 100k string catenation. Now lets replace this with StringBuilder and see.  8 ms!!!!!! That is a massive performance difference. Hope you get the point. More info on StringBuilder can be found here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.stringbuilder?view=net-7.0
Post a Comment
Read more