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

Question

I used to develop my web applications 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 for my application), and IIS express cannot handle this AFAIK
2) In most cases, I don’t need a debugger → I just (re) create my application and update my browser - IIS Express reboots and the VS debugger spends some time

Now I tried my first web application using ASP.NET 5 aka Core 1.0, and I could not get it to work in full IIS to continue using my famous workflow. I found out that I can start IIS Express without debugging and just rebuild to solve # 2, but # 1 is still open.

Is full IIS support for ASP.NET 5 / Core 1.0 supported during development? If there is any documentation on how to set it up?

All the documentation for full IIS that I found is for publication, but not for development.

Answer 1

Integration mode with full IIS has been changed several times (from Beta to RC1 and now to RC2), which spoiled the documentation,

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

You probably need to wait until RC2 is available to view the latest official steps.

Answer 2

In fact, you cannot use the IIS event in development using Asp.Net Core. Asp.Net Core was separated from IIS and even in IIS production will only act as a reverse proxy server sending requests to your AspNet.Core application. Asp.Net Core uses Kestrel as an application server and is much easier to use during development. To get the same workflow that you used before using dnx watch / dotnet watch during development, which will watch the 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 update your browser to see the changes (note that this is another step that you had before, when you needed to rebuild the application yourself).

You still need 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 advantages.