The weirdness between VS dev server and IIS

Every once in awhile I find some strange differences between IIS and the ASP.NET dev server that comes in Visual Studio. The previous item was that IIS seems to have at least two instance of HttpModules, while the dev server only has one.

The new one I noticed tonight I think has something to do with page caching, or at least how Firefox responds to the two servers differently. I have a link button in my forum app that marks a forum as "read," which does the data piece, then does a hard redirect back to the page. (I realize this probably isn't necessary, but I'll revisit that at some other point.) Firefox, however, has the version of the page with the "new posts" indicators still sitting there. If you refresh the page, you're golden.

It doesn't even happen consistently though, which is annoying, and it doesn't happen at all in the VS dev server. Little things like that make it a little harder to really be sure that what you're doing is what you'll get in production. It's rare, but the idea sits there and torments me. :)

2 Comments

  • The built in server is always off.

    I find it very annoying each time I have to into VS and use View in Browser" or Start to view a page. The pain just grows if you have multiple web apps. You need to make sure not to close any of them.

    Its surely a nice feature for people who don't have IIS or can't configure it but for the rest IIS is better.


  • The other day someone pointed out one advantage of the WebDev server:

    Pages don't timeout so you can use it for things that take a hour or 2

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