Cassini Web Server

Cassini for ASP.NET and Visual Studio Developers

Cassini Web Server, as it’s distributed by UltiDev LLC, is based on code published at www.asp.net. However, to make Cassini truly useful and developer-friendly we added numerous powerful features, like:

• We made Cassini a windows service capable of running multiple ASP.NET applicationssimultaneously;
• Most important for Visual Studio developers, UltiDev Cassini can be easily included into your setup package. In Visual Studio 2005 UltiDev Cassini components are added as a Setup Prerequisites. In Visual Studio .NET 2003 Cassini is added as a custom Setup.exe bootstrapper for your MSI package.
• Applications distributed along with UltiDev Cassini can register themselves with the Cassini server after the installation - without you having to write a single line of code.
• We added Cassini Explorer - an ASP.NET application management user interface. Cassini Explorer is running under Cassini, of course;
• We added a very simple Cassini Configuration .NET API  for advanced application registration and configuration scenarios.

UltiDev Cassini Web Server comes in two flavors that are functionally equivalent, but target different versions of .NET Framework. Cassini 1.1 supports ASP.NET applications compiled for ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1 and requires .NET Framework 1.1 to run. Cassini 2.0 supports applications compiled for ASP.NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, and requires both .NET Framework 1.0 and 2.0 to be installed. The decision which one to use will be driven by what version of .NET Framework you expect your customers to have, as well as what version of ASP.NET your application was made for.

The remainder of this document is the set of detailed walkthroughs explaining how to make your ASP.NET application working with Cassini, how to debug with it, and how to create setup packages that bundle your ASP.NET application with UltiDev Cassini Web Server.