ASP.NET 5 MVC 6 Beta 8 - Do I have to use kestrel with IIS Express?

Question

Working with ASP.NET 5 MVC 6, Beta 8. Using IIS Express in a local dev windows 10 environment with IE Edge as my browser, but I noticed that IIS Express won't server the page without have a reference to Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel in my project.

I thought Kestrel was the cross platform web server and not necessarily what you needed to work with IIS Express, so can someone explain why the reference is needed now?

Answer 1

Microsoft made changes to the hosting model, because having two different hosting models for IIS introduced inconsistencies.

Hosting ASP.NET 5 applications in IIS will now be achieved using the IIS HttpPlatformHandler configured to forward through to the ASP.NET 5 Kestrel server. The HttpPlatformHandler is a native IIS module that needs to be installed by an administrator on the server running IIS.

This blog post describes it further under the headline Changes to IIS Hosting Model .