It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as with the Visual Studio Development Server. It does not require changes in your web application code. It supports and enables the same extensibility model and Web.config file settings as IIS 7. IIS Express offers the following features: Because IIS Express is similar to IIS 7, it lets you transition web sites to IIS more smoothly than the built-in Visual Studio Development Server does. IIS Express includes many of the features of IIS 7 web server without requiring you to install and manage IIS 7 on your computer. For information about how to specify one of the alternative web servers, see How to: Specify the Web Server for Web Projects in Visual Studio. Specifying the Web Server for a Visual Studio Web Projectīy default, Visual Studio 2012 uses IIS Express. If you use IIS Express or the Visual Studio Development Server, it is recommended that you test your application on a staging server that uses the target version of IIS before deploying it to a live site.

For more information, see Disadvantages of Using IIS Express or the Visual Studio Development Server later in this topic. IIS Express and the Visual Studio Development Server are designed to emulate IIS, but they are configured differently and may fail to reveal errors that can occur when you deploy to a production version of IIS. You can use IIS with web application projects, but not with web site projects. For more information, see Disadvantages of Using IIS as a Development Server with Visual Studio later in this topic.

Use IIS when you want to test your web application using the server environment that is closest to what the live site will run under, and it is practical for you to install and work with IIS on your development computer. Cassini is the default web server when you open a file system folder as a web site project, but you can use IIS Express by choosing Use IIS Express from the Website menu. IIS Express is the default web server for web application projects in Visual Studio 2012 and is recommended for both web application projects and web site projects.Īlso known as Cassini, the Visual Studio Development Server is the legacy development web server. The following table provides summary guidance for choosing a web server in Visual web Developer. This topic describes each of the web servers and how to select the server to test with. For a file-based web site project, you can use IIS Express or the built-in Visual Studio Development Server. You can use any of these servers with a file-based web application project. Visual Studio lets you test with different web servers, including IIS Express, Internet Information Services (IIS), or the built-in Visual Studio Development Server. When you develop web projects in Visual Studio, you need a web server to test or run them. Web Servers in Visual Studio for ASP.NET Web Projects

Visual studio web server settings