Using IIS7 on Vista vs. Visual Studio's Internal Webserver

I spend quite a bit of time developing websites.  Being able to quickly create website is a boon, and if you're developing a website with Visual Studio, it's internal webserver is great for its ease of configuration.  There is no configuration - if you're website is open in VS.NET, you can instantly test and debug it right from within the IDE.

The internal webserver is extremely simple, and fails to implement many features which are available in "real" webservers.  Since it's only intended as a development server, this isn't necessarily a big deal.  As a developer-only tool you probably don't care about its performance much (it's noticeably slower), nor about logging (it can only serve local pages anyhow), SSL (not supported), the exact HTTP support (different from IIS), HTTP 1.1 Hostname-based processing (ignored), or any of a myriad advanced features found in IIS.

There's an intrinsic value in running on the same platform you'll deploy on - the fewer differences there are, the fewer bugs you won't be able to reproduce.  And of course, you can't easily test or debug anything relying on IIS features with a different web server.

Fortunately, you can set VS.NET to use IIS and not it's own internal webserver.  This is especially attractive on Vista, since its webserver is far less crippled than that of Windows XP.  The downside is that it doesn't quite work out of the box on VS.NET 2005.

Nevertheless, it's less buggy that the internal web server, it's faster, and it saves you time in the long run by avoiding an unnecessary difference between between the live site and your development environment.