In a production environment, when a user visits an ASP.NET application, like Kentico CMS, their browser sends a request to the website. The HTTP request is received by the production web server and is processed by Internet Information Services (IIS). IIS provides the coordination with the ASP.NET runtime to generate and return the content for the requested resource. IIS is built for use in production servers. Installing IIS in our development environment means additional installation steps and requires security updates. Additionally, IIS may not always be an option for the following reasons:
You are using the Kentico CMS WebProject with Windows XP Home Edition, which doesn't support IIS
You don't want to host a web server on your local computer for security reasons
Your company has a corporate policy that doesn't allow the installation of IIS
In order to alleviate this problem, the Visual Studio development environment includes an ASP.NET Development Server. Specifically...