Key differences between IIS 7 and IIS Developer Express

Some of the primary differences between IIS 7 and IIS developer express are mentioned below.

Integrated with OS
IIS 7 ships with the operating system and is tightly integrated to Windows. IIS developer express is a separate downloadable tool

Targetted users
IIS 7 is for both developers as well as for production purposes. IIS developer express can be used only for development purposes and not for production.

Supported Windows editions
IIS 7 will work only on Windows Vista and newer editions of Windows. In case of server OS, IIS 7 will work only on Windows 2008.

IIS developer edition will work even on older version - starting from Windows XP and newer.

Process model and activation
In IIS 7, the worker thread is automatically launched and managed by Windows Process Activation Service. In case of IIS Express, user has to handle this.

FTP support
IIS developer express does not support FTP while IIS 7 supports it.

WCF support
IIS Developer express supports only WCF over HTTP. IIS 7 supports WCF including over TCP, Named Pipes, and MSMQ.

Multi developer support
IIS 7 is a single user application. IIS Developer express supports multi developer environment. Configuration files, settings, and Web content are maintained on a per-user basis.

Visual Studio integration
All editions and versions of Visual Studio has buil in support for IIS 7. Only VS 2010 and future versions will have built-in support for IIS developer express.

Runtime extensions
IIS developer has support for URL Rewrite and FastCGI. Webmatrix offers support for SEO, database management and Web Deployment. Other extensions that are offered with IIS are not yet tested with IIS Developer express.

Management Tools
IIS 7 is managed using the IIS Manager. IIS Developer express can be managed using Webmatrix. Also, the express edition has support through system tray.

As soon as I find more about IIS developer express, I will post updates here.

Port used by IIS
The default website comes with IIS 7 listens to port 80. The default website part of IIS developer express listens to port 8080 to avoid conflicts with IIS 7 when they are running side by side.

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