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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.

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Richard Byrdk said…
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21 December 2012 at 13:32
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