Differences between IIS 6.0 / Windows 2003 and IIS 7.0 / Windows 2008

Question

I am considering currently to get a VPS for some of my development test. I found some VPS at a cheap price, which suits me as it's only going to be used as a sandbox.

So far I know it is possible to install .Net 3.5 on the windows 2003 without problems, if I am correct it will be also possible to use IIS6 for all my development including asp.net mvc.

I am looking here if there is anything that would prevent me from using IIS6. I looked on google and apparently the main thing about IIS 7 is the modular design for plugins. This shouldn't be too much of a problem as most of my devs will be for personnal use.

Answer 1

IIS7 will provide faster services, but IIS6 should be able to do everything you need (unless you need to run PHP or something of the sort on IIS).

Answer 2

(PHP on IIS will run fine with IIS6)

Our devs are doing all their development against Win2k3 / IIS6 servers with .NET 3.5 and have not encountered any issues that would have been fixed with IIS7. Which is probably good since I've yet to stand up a 2k8 server.

Answer 3

For devs, I think the main thing IIS7 adds is the integrated managed pipeline that allows you to write .NET code for IIS instead of an ISAPI filter.

Shared configs, FastCGI, caching improvements, etc. I think of more as admin features. Useful, but won't really affect your dev time.