Isolated Development on IIS 5.1 & 6.0

[Wm. Scott Miller]

We have been looking at how to develop in a team environment where our
servers are all Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6.0) and all our development
machines are Windows XP (IIS 5.1). We are doing all ASP.NET applications.
We have been using a non-isolated development model (all development happens
directly on a server) and it has worked fine with only two developers, but
we are expanding and it is no longer an option. The model that we are
looking at is the isolated development model where each developer develops
in their local machine (IIS 5.1) and then depolys to the test/production
servers (IIS 6.0). Where can I find information about configuring IIS 5.1
and IIS 6.0 identically for ASP.NET development? OR Is there a resource
that tells how to work in isolated development model in a mixed IIS 5.1 and
6.0 environment? ALSO Are there any "gotchas" when developing on IIS 5.1
and deloying to IIS 6.0?

Thanks,
Scott

 

[Winista]

One difference you will find is that in IIS6 ASP.Net process runs under
Network Service account and on IIS5.1 (XP) it runs under ASPNET account. So
if you have any dependency on this account then you will have to account for
it. But if you are using Windows authentication, then there is no
difference. Other than this, you should be all set.

 

[Wm. Scott Miller]

Thank you for the reply!

So if we are using a limited domain account on IIS 6.0 for our Windows
Authentication, do we just add the ASPNET account of the development machine
for a trusted connection or do we configure 5.1 to use the same limited
domain account? I seem to remember having to make sure configurations under
the Local Machine Policy were correct to use this. Is that correct and if
so can you point me in the right direction? Or, is there a way to add the
IIS_WPG on a 5.1 machine to make configuration simpler?

Scott

 

[Erik Funkenbusch]

ALSO Are there any "gotchas" when developing on IIS 5.1
and deloying to IIS 6.0?

Plenty. You don't say if you're using .NET 1.1 or 2.0, i'll assume 1.1
since 2.0 comes with the development web server that solves most of these
issues.

First, on XP, you can only have one web site, the default web site. If you
need to develop multiple sites, then you have to do a lot of of swapping
around of IIS configurations, though I suppose you could write a script to
make this easy.

Second, if you're doing anything that depends on domain identity, then you
will run into certain problems. Some operations can't be done on XP, and
require a server version of Windows. Also, the identity of the worker
process runs as a different user by default.

IIS6 has Application Pools, while IIS 5.x doesn't. If you configure your
app with pools, then various conditions will be different between your
clients and servers.

Certain, server side services won't be available on XP, mostly involving
MSMQ and the like. If you're not using anything that's server version
specific, you don't have to worry about this.