Use full IIS during ASP.NET 5 / Core 1.0 development

Question

I used to develop my web-apps using ASP.NET 4.x and host them in full IIS already during development, because:

1) I use multi-tenancy (site1.me.local and site2.me.local point to my app) and IIS express can't handle that AFAIK
2) Most of the times I do not need a debugger -> I just (re)build my app and refresh the browser - restarting IIS Express and the VS debugger wastes some time

Now I tried my first web-app using ASP.NET 5 aka Core 1.0 and I wasn't able to get it to run in full IIS to continue using my known workflow. I found out I can start IIS Express without debugging and just rebuild to solve #2, but #1 is still open.

Is full IIS even supported for ASP.NET 5 / Core 1.0 during development? If so is there some documentation on how to set that up around?

All documentation for full IIS I found is for publishing, but not for development.

Answer 1

You may actually not event want to use IIS in development with Asp.Net Core. Asp.Net Core has been separated from IIS and even in production IIS will only act as a reverse proxy passing requests to your AspNet.Core application. Asp.Net Core uses Kestrel as an application server and it is much easier to use just this during development. To get a similar workflow you had before you would use dnx watch / dotnet watch during development which will watch code files of your application and if any of the files changes it will stop the application, rebuild the project and restart the application. This is when you can refresh the browser to see changes (note that this is even one less step that you had before where you had to rebuild the application yourself).

It still should be possible to use IIS for development if you really need it but if you don't have a specific scenario that requires IIS I don't think IIS for development will give you any benefits.

Answer 2

The integration mode with full IIS has been changed several times (from Beta to RC1 and now to RC2), which messes up the documentation,

https://github.com/aspnet/Announcements/issues/164

You probably need to wait till RC2 is available to see the latest official steps.