Visual Web Developer’s ASP.NET Development Web Server

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It comes with a host of drop and drag and click and select features that speed up the development of your website.

One of the main benefits of working with VWD is that you don’t need to have Internet Information Services installed to run your ASP.NET pages. Previous versions of ASP.NET prior to ASP.NET 2.0 required IIS to be configured and running on your local machine in order for you to create, run and test your pages. Microsoft has addressed this issue and now VWD comes with a built in file system web server called ‘Cassini’ that will run your ASP.NET pages.

So if you have a copy of Windows XP Home Edition you can run ASP.NET 2.0 on your machine. Cassini is merely a development server that will let you develop, run and test your website, when you’re finished developing the web site you can migrate the site to a machine with the full scale web server IIS installed.

When you open VWD and select 'File > New Web Site' make sure you select 'File System' as highlighted below if you wish to run your web site with the built in development server.

Figure 1

You can learn how to download and install Visual Web Developer that comes with .NET Framework 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 installed and SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. If any of these are already installed then they won’t be reinstalled.

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