multi targeting – Abhijit's Blog

IIS Express is a lightweight, self-contained version of IIS optimized for developers. IIS Express provides the power of IIS7.x while making it easy to develop and test websites. Why we say that it has power of IIS7.x because it runs on code base of IIS 7.5. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta allows you to build and test web applications using IIS Express instead of the built-in ASP.NET Development Web Server (Cassini). If you want to use IIS Express with VS 2010, you have to install IIS Express separately on top of Service Pack 1. To know more about details of use of IIS Express, please read the post http://bit.ly/i8BN1H . We can set IIS Express as default Web Server for Visual Studio or We can also change from Project Properties. Well, In this post I am going to talk about how we run the both IIS and Cassini simultaneously for multiple projects in a single solutions.

While running your ASP.net application you might have found it to be running on Integrated Web development environment. Visual Studio 2010 comes with two version of Integrated Web Development environment which could run side by side. In case you run your ASP.NET application in VS 2010 you can have an option to choose between the two version of Web Development environment, one running CLR 2.0, which was there before VS2010 and a new version of Web Dev with CLR 4.0. Multi – targeting allows you to configure your visual studio to run more than one Web Dev server at a time one using CLR 2.0 and another using CLR 4.0

In one of my ASP.NET Online session I had talked about the multi targeting features of Visual Studio 2010 for web development. During the demo I have shown, how we can target two different version of .NET CLR version same time. Some of the attendees having some doubts on that, So in this blog post, I am going to explain how we can target two different version of CLR at same time.

To demonstrate it, Start with a new Visual Studio Instance, and Create a solution file which contains two different Framework version of web applications. Let’s say there are two web application which are targeting to ASP.NET 3.5 and ASP.NET 4.0 version.