I’m not a hardcore programmer, but I did develop a company website using MS Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and I want to keep working on it and I want to add things like a company Portal. I use just a local desktop home computer (Windows XP Professional) and I just recently (thanks to good people here) moved to a webhosting company that has the ASP.NET 4.0 Framework on their servers. Locally, when I want to view my website, I can see click “file” then “view in browser” and it points me to localhost. Alternatively, I can upload it to my server’s alternative FTP site where I can work on development. I guess what I’m saying is that this computer isn’t a server; it’s just a desktop that I developed the site on.
I keep reading about Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Do I need to download this onto my computer? If so, which IIS do I download? What is it for, and how will it benefit me? I also bookmarked the MS Internet Information Services Toolkit, but again, I don’t know if it’s worth my time to download this, or if it’s pointless.
Any guidance in this regard would be extremely helpful. Thanks!
- Jason Weber
It might not be necessary to install IIS to work on an asp.net app. If you have your site in Visual Studio as a web application project rather than a web site project then when you run that project from VS then it will start from it’s own built in web server. Thus a webserver such as IIS isn’t a requirement for your dev work.
It’s easy enough to put on IIS by following these other answers. That said, if it were me, the easy thing to do would be to have it as a web application project and run it from Visual Studio.