14 DAY TRIAL // The final version of a stripped down Internet Information Services 7.5 is now available for download from Microsoft.
Dubbed IIS Express 7.5, this flavor of the Internet Information Services can be downloaded and used free of charge, per the same model as SQL Server Express and Visual Studio Express.
And just as additional solutions from Microsoft carrying the Express tag, IIS Express 7.5 is also designed so that developers can leverage it when building their projects.
Of course, Express automatically implies that this release of IIS is just a stripped down version of the real thing.
In fact, the software giant has intended for IIS Express 7.5 to be used by devs for the development and testing of web applications running on Windows in scenarios involving ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types.
“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. Specifically:
•It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install)
•It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio
•It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules
•It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support
•It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all)
•It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms,” explained Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform.
Devs will notice that IIS Express 7.5 is set up to run as a process instead of a service, which means that it will be right there when they’ll need it, but won’t consume any resources when it’s not running.
With the first upgrade to Visual Studio 2010, namely Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft is also planning to enable IIS Express 7.5 in the development platform.
“IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios,” Guthrie added.
“You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server. The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights.”
IIS Express 7.5 is available for download here.