Cassini vs IIS

Cassini is a “simple, fully managed Web server that hosts ASP.NET” (source). It’s a lightweight “server” you get when you create a new ASP.NET application in Visual Studio.

Cassini has been pitched to those who don’t have IIS on their computers but want to develop in ASP.NET. This works great for hobbyists. However, Cassini is no IIS. It’s much slower, it hangs and crashes easily.

The reason I’m writing this is to convince you not to use Cassini within an organization. Sooner or later you will deploy your app on a real web server only to realize that something is badly broken. The problem never came up because Cassini is not a real web server and therefore issues were simply swept under the carpet.

I find the fact that we can't run the same IIS version on a development box as on a server quite frustrating. Sure you could develop using a server build of Windows, but that's not exactly practicle. Cassini is, as noted, for hobbyists only.

Hi,
I agree with all you say about cassini, we had many issues magically appear after publishing to a real IIS server, especially memory management :( .
So what do you think is the best method for working?
What is your solution?

Thanks

Perhaps you can describe some of the problems you encounter in a future blog post. I'm developing for years with Cassini and while it's slow, I’m rarely having problems with it.

vvvlad and Stephen: the key theme of this post is "using Cassini within an organization." The best thing to do is to get all team members off Cassini and on to an operating system with IIS6 or IIS7.

The next best thing is to have everyone create a web site within IIS for each project. This requires a version of IIS that actually supports more than one web site, i.e. IIS7 or IIS6 with hacks. Windows Server 2003/2008 or even Vista will do.

We have been using XP PRO IIS Admin on XP boxes for quite some time and works like a charm. Allows developers to build application that can be hosted by IIS and not by Cassini. Tool allows you to create multiple IIS Sites, however you can run only one site at any given time. Unlike IIS6/IIS7 on Windows server. Main benefit I get is consistent level of debugging support that IIS(aspnet_wp.exe). Additionally I have seen all CSS/DHTML related issues are better handled on IIS, than Cassini.

XP PRO IIS Admin is a free utility and will defnietly help developers in an XP environment.