Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) announced last week that it has started shipping its new IIS Express 7.5 Web server for free. It is shipped as part of the January Web Release, which also includes ASP.NET, MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet and Orchard.
Since WebMatrix's launch last week, Web hosting provider Codero announced its support for the tool on Tuesday and TemplateMonster released its Razor templates Monday for WebMatrix as well.
"We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.Net Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS," Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in the Microsoft Developer Divison said in a blog post.
Guthrie says Microsoft's IIS Express 7.5 is optimized for developer scenarios and is compatible with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types.
IIS 7.5 enables a full Web server feature set but is less than 5MB download and is easily installed, according to Guthrie. It can be distributed as-is and since this is enabled by the licensing agreement, special approval is not needed.
IIS 7.5 works on Windows XP or higher and does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio. It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS Web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server and supports the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7x support.
Since its IIS Express Beta 3, Microsoft has added support for nine languages (other than English) and has made several bug fixes. Source thewhir
