My company has an existing software product that, among other things, has a web service / mobile website component that currently exists as an application in IIS. Since this application is hosted by each individual client (we currently do not offer centralized hosting and probably will not be in the foreseeable future), this means that each client server must install and configure IIS for our services to work,
We are going through the process of rewriting the application, and I am exploring the possibility of removing the IIS requirement. The many environments in which our application runs (all from workstations from XP Pro to servers on 2008 R2), administering several different versions of IIS has become a headache for support. We would like to do something similar to what SQL Server Reporting Services have done since 2008, where the functionality seems to be the same and the sites can interact with IIS sites, but IIS is not required and is not installed as part of the installer.
In our new application, WCF is used for communication through web services, and self-service of WCF services is quite simple. These are web applications (i.e. serving HTML browsers) that seem to be freezing. One thing that is not negotiable is that we should be able to develop sites in Visual Studio as regular ASP.NET web applications (Webforms or MVC), but we would like to host them in our service.
I looked at IIS Express and IIS Hostable Web Core, but it does not seem to be suitable for what we are looking for; IIS Express is an external product that requires its own installer, and Hostable Web Core requires IIS installation.
Is there something that will allow us to embed a fully functional ASP.NET-compatible web server in our Windows service?
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