ASP.Net portable server

Question

hi. I'm trying to start on a new project to help enrich my asp.net knowledge, since I'm not completely satisfied with what my class is teaching me. From my (very little) experience with Rails, I recall every application containing its own development web server. Say I were trying to create a local-only application, but I want it to run in a web browser (Therefore ASP.Net). Are there any options in terms of being able to distribute an application and have it launch its own, or just not require IIS/VS/Apache-mono?

Thank you,

Cameron

Answer 1

Follow this guide to setup IIS on your PC to run ASP.NET apps:

http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial25%5FSetting-up-your-ASPNET-server-IIS.html

Answer 2

I'm assuming that you want to run the site on the same machine you are developing it on.

Visual Studio 2005 and up allows you to run the site from VS itself if you want to view it locally on your development machine.

To my understanding Visual Web Developer allows you to do the same as well. Visual Web Developer

Answer 3

You can use the cassini web server. Please note that those are different redistributable:

http://www.asp.net/Downloads/archived/cassini/

http://ultidev.com/products/Cassini/

Answer 4

You may want to look into aspNETserve. It sounds like it would fit your needs. I haven't worked on it recently, so it probably has some rough edges.

On the plus side its all open source, and if you are just getting started with ASP.NET it would be a real eye opener on how the internals of the ASP.NET lifecycle operate.

Answer 5

I'm not really certain why you would want to develop a web application (with all the difficulties it entails, due to the fact that you are dealing with a stateless connection to an unknown client machine), but then run the entire thing on the client machine.

Surely it makes more sense to develop a WinForms application?

Answer 6

The simple answer is that you need a web server to run the application. It cannot run without one.

If we're talking demo purposes or you don't require that many features of a web server there are redistributable web-servers that you can include with your setup package. Like Alex mentioned the most popular one seems to be Cassini.