A Handy IIS Express (Test) Helper Class
Oftentimes, when developing or integration-testing a piece of software that is web-based (for example a web site or a web service component such as an Azure Mobile Service), being able to start and stop a web server programmatically on an as-needed basis comes in very handy.
This is where IIS Express comes into play. IIS Express basically is a lightweight, self-contained version of his big sibling, the fully fledged Internet Information Server. Because it doesn’t run as a service and doesn’t require administrator rights, it is ideally suited for developing and testing web sites and services locally – just like Visual Studio starts an instance of IIS Express when you hit F5 on a web application/service.
This post presents a helper class to programmatically interact with the IIS Express web server.