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I have only read a bit about IIS Express, and am in the process of downloading and installing it now. It seems like i should be able to uninstall IIS proper and just make use of IIS Express when developing/debugging webserver-based technologies in visual studio (2010 SP1).

  1. Is this a sane conclusion?
  2. What development scenarios might not play well with IIS Express?
  3. Are there cases wherein IIS proper would absolutely still be needed?

My use of IIS in the past has been for ASP.NET MVC cases, a few web service debugging sessions, etc. Obviously IIS proper is still needed for actually hosting the resulting solutions, but can i realistically "free up resources" and just use IIS Express on demand?

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

To my knowledge some known issues with IIS Express:

  1. Only http/https protocols are supported

  2. There is limited UI support (through Visual Studio and WebMatrix) to configure IIS Express. But you can configure it manually by editing applicationhost.config.

  3. IIS Express runs as current logged on user, so you may run into issues like http://forums.iis.net/t/1175734.aspx

  4. It will be slow because by default failed request tracing and console tracing are enabled (failed request tracing can be disabled by editing applicationhost.config file)

  5. Kernel mode caching is not supported

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Along these lines, using IIS Express in place of IIS doesn't exactly free any resources. –  Chris Lively Mar 15 '11 at 20:38
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