I’ve been using IIS Express lately with Silverlight and WCF services and have learned to appreciate the “real-world” advantage it gives you versus the built-in Visual Studio “Cassini” server. Although I’ve always preferred to use IIS whenever possible, sometimes that’s not an option when you’re first starting a project and working on a machine that doesn’t have IIS installed. By using IIS Express you can identify security, configuration and other issues that may occur as you move an application to a real IIS 7+ server upfront rather than finding out about the issues after you move an application to a dev/staging server. In this post I’ll walk-through some of the lessons learned and walls encountered when I started working with authentication in IIS Express. It’s easy to work with once you know a few fundamentals. If you don’t already have IIS Express installed (it comes with Visual Studio 2010 SP1) you can get it through the Web Platform Installer or here.
The details listed below should help get you started running Silverlight applications that consume WCF services on IIS Express. The general principles can be applied to other application frameworks such as ASP.NET though as well. Keep in mind that you’ll more than likely have to change additional configuration settings on your machine depending upon the type of security you’re using in your project.
Using IIS Express
Switching to IIS Express is a simple as right-clicking on your Web project and selecting Use IIS Express:
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