developing and testing your asp.net applications

Whenever you're developing ASP.Net applications in Visual Studio, off course you want to test your applications.

Most ASP.Net applications are deployed on internet information server, however as a developer you do not always want to install internet information server (IIS) on your development PC.

Today, I discovered that Visual Studio 2005 comes with an ASP.Net development server application program which filename is: WebDev.Webserver.exe.

This program is located under the following directory (in my case):

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

You can search for this program by searching under your Windows folder.

When you start this application, Windows displays how you should use it. You can start it by using the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt (via your Windows Start menu), however, I made a shortcut on my desktop that starts this webserver. In the properties of the shortcut I used the following target:

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\WebDev.WebServer.EXE /port:8080 /path:"c:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyApp" /vpath:"/MyApp"

On my harddisk I made the following folder in which I deploy the ASP.Net applications for testing purposes:

c:\inetpub\wwwroot\MyApp

In your browser the webserver can be contacted by entering the following address:

http://localhost:8080/MyApp