Is it possible to host an ASPX web page, in a stand alone application, outside of IIS

Question

I have a thick GUI application (possibly running as a service, but also just as a normal application) on a desktop. I would like to expose a web interface to the application for some remote monitoring and control of the application.

I currently am hosting a WCF service that just returns HTML in the application, which works fine, but optimally I would like to use an ASP.Net application, or a silverlight application.

Is there any way to host the aspx or silverlight app from within my app?

As part of this, I would like to be able to share data between the two applications.

Answer 1

as i see it, the most simple solution for you is to put a browser control on your app, in the browser put a silverlight app,

if you wanna share data between the app and the silverlight you can try to expose a wcf service from the app to the silverlight if it works its also very simple.

Answer 2

Yes. You don't even need Cassini, as it wraps ASPX hosting bits already present in the framework it's all inside System.Web.Hosting

MSDN has a good article on it all

Answer 3

ScottHa has an article on hosting Cassini for unit tests. I've used it before, with a couple of slight modifications, for unit tests and it works great.

Not sure what differences you get by just using HTTP.SYS directly, but either should work pretty well, I think.