IIS Express

[dilettante]

I see a lot of recent interest in VB6 on the web server, some of it as DLLs hosted in classic ASP pages.

What do you think about IIS Express? It can be acquired at Internet Information Services (IIS) 10.0 Express


It looks like it may have advantages as a development target.

[dilettante]

Something to consider is that IIS Express only accepts connections from localhost clients.

Maybe your goal is to do something like build a home automation server using one of those low-power fanless PCs that come with Win10 Home. If want to use IIS to provide a UI and web services to your LAN then you might want to hack this.

See: Serving external traffic with WebMatrix Beta which talks about WebMatrix which uses (used?) IIS Express. There may be enough info there to figure out the process without WebMatrix.

Other possibilities are mentioned in How to enable external request in IIS Express?

Maybe somebody else can offer a concise set of steps to accomplish this based on their experience?

[DEXWERX]

I develop using IIS Express mostly because it doesn't require DEBUG rights, which are disabled as policy on Gov't/ and most corporate environments.
Haven't worked out how to set it up without WebMatrix yet... which would be valuable now that WebMatrix is mostly obsolete.

[DllHell]

The primary advantage is that it is installed, configured, and integrated automatically as part of newer versions of visual studio. Clicking f5 does everything necessary to see your web app\pages and adds the hooks to enable interactive debugging.

you can use a proxy to serve outside local host:
https://github.com/icflorescu/iisexpress-proxy

Not sure if it would be useful for vb6 dlls. You wouldn't be able to debug them and you could easily script the build\deploy\register to a full version of iis for testing.