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IIS express not installed - vs shell


I have visual studio shell installed on my machine. First time I am hearing this. What is that? Can I use that to developer build and deploy application? What is diff with professional edition?VS shell is free?


Solution

  • Not herd the term "shell" ever used to describe VS.

    Their is Visual Studio Professional edition that you have to pay for, and then there is Visual Studio Community edition which is a free to download and free to use. The difference between the two? Not much. I used the Professional editor for about 5 years. I am now using the free community edition, and there nothing at all that I miss, or can even tell that is different.

    So the community edition is really amazing, and I would say its one of the most amazing tools that can be had for free.

    During a install of VS, it should setup and install IIS express for you. if not, then I would re-launch the installer and see if you did not check or include the web parts to install.

    IIS express again is fine for web development. About the only difference that you really notice or miss from IIS express as compared to the full web server? the configuration screens and manager for IIS is MUCH more rich and has a lot more settings from the GUI.

    However, even now, I use IIS express for development, and everything I do or have in that web site works 100% perfect during development with IIS express compared to when I deploy the resulting application to a full web server running full edition of IIS.

    I don't recall having to install IIS express separately from the VS 2019 community edition.

    So, download and install Visual Studio 2019 community edition. It should result in installing everything you need. This will allow development of web applications, or desktop. It includes everything you need and require - including that of deployment and even create a software installers.

    I also recommend installing SQL Express if you planning to use and develop a web application that uses SQL server as the database system. And once again, SQL express is fine feature wise compared to the full edition of SQL SERVER for 99% of anything you do or need.

    The free community edition of VS allows c#, vb.net desktop, or web development. Everything you need to build applications is included - even for web development. The difference between this version and the full edition of VS are minor, and in fact VERY minor.