Since starting developing ASP.NET projects I find myself familiar just touching F5 for debugging. I think most of us are learned that way?
From then and much later I learned to live with the spooky port number dedication, xx multiple instances of WebDevXX.exe in my notification bar and the relatively slow loading time. Partly by the start-up and partly also the browsing and testing. Who avoided any kind of issues with erroneous PDB file locations? (Breakpoint could not be hit) Not me!
I never had a real reason to dispute this. But the project settings tab has always been there. "Web" tab, "Servers". I never touched it. Sometimes I manually entered a port number and or a start page path. Custom IIS Web Server? Custom Web Server? That option looked too spooky to touch.
I've now taken the step to kick this absurd thing "WebDev", freshen up my local IIS installation and hooked it into my Visual Studio environment to see and decide what I will loose on this...
Surprisingly, I just press F5. The web page opens surprisingly quick (compared to webdev). The breakpoints were hit immediately. Browsing and testing the web app is nearly the same speed as deployed.
I thought, "OK I'm Lost with IIS when it came to debug client side content" Again, I was surprised. I put breakpoints in a line of JavaScript. I got a superquick break of code and second later Visual Studio showed the breakpoint to me.
My question for discussion is, why are we so automatically using Cassini and what are the drawbacks of local IIS? I say we because I know lot of developers do this - including a few really experienced ones.