
IIS Express includes many of the features of IIS 7 and IIS 8 web servers without requiring you to install and manage IIS on your computer. For more information about about how to specify one of the alternative web servers, see How to: Specify the Web Server for Web Projects in Visual Studio. Specifying the Web Server for a Visual Studio Web Projectīy default, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 use IIS Express. If you use IIS Express, it is recommended that you test your application on a staging server that uses the target version of IIS before deploying it to a live site. For more information, see Disadvantages of Using IIS Express later in this topic. IIS Express is designed to emulate IIS, but minor differences between IIS Express and the full version of IIS may result in errors that occur only after you have deployed your website to a production version of IIS. Visual Studio 2013 adds support for specifying custom Web servers in your projects this functionality enables developers to define the environment for testing their Web applications. For more information, see Advantages of using an External Host as a Development Server with Visual Studio later in this topic.

You can specify the URL of an external host that you will use for testing. You can use IIS with web application projects, but not with web site projects. For more information, see Disadvantages of Using IIS as a Development Server with Visual Studio later in this topic. Use IIS when you want to test your web application using the server environment that is closest to what the live site will run under, and it is practical for you to install and work with IIS on your development computer. IIS Express is the default web server for web application projects in Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013, and it is recommended for both web application projects and web site projects. The following table provides summary guidance for choosing a web server in Visual web Developer. This topic describes each of the web servers and how to select a web server for testing.


For a file-based web site project, you can use IIS Express. You can use any of these web servers with a file-based web application project. Visual Studio lets you test with different web servers, including IIS Express, Internet Information Services (IIS), External Hosts, or Custom Web Servers. When you develop web projects in Visual Studio, you need a web server to test or run them.
