I've always wondered about this ... and thankfully, now have a good environment of experts to ask this question.
When creating a web application project which web server is the most expedient to use?
This is a duplicate question ... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/281667/asp-net-development-server-or-localhost-iis ... my bad!
Read this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/281667/asp-net-development-server-or-localhost-iis
My question aimed more at general use than Web Apps specifically though..
I think Visual Studio Development server is build to test and run your application to see how they will work..
on the other hand IIS is the real deal ... it is the webserver that your application will run with..
The VS development server is certainly less fuss. It makes developing multiple websites alot easier to manage. If you do not have a dedicated test environment running IIS I would certainly opt to run IIS locally though.
I'd use both.
Use the VS built-in server for the first level testing on a day-to-day basis, and then a test IIS server for the next level up testing. For minute-by-minute changes to your code, you can't beat the VS built in server for convenience.
I used to use a dedicated test IIS server for ALL testing, and it slowed my down and didn't give enough benefit; it still worthwhile though to test your deployment on a full blown IIS server before going live.