Visual Studio 2015 provides ASP.NET web development environment directly with IIS Express. It is very straight forward to start web development with this setting. But if you ever used Visual Studio 2015 with Local IIS, you would find that it is much more convenient and you would love it.

This tutorial will go through how to set up ASP.NET web development environment with Visual Studio 2015 and Local IIS on Windows 7 briefly.

Install IIS 7 on Windows 7

Windows 7 comes with IIS support. But you need to turn on the features from Control Panel. Follow this link to set it up.

You can also install IIS extensions and popular applications (such as Umbraco, the famous CMS application with .NET) with Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Check this link out.

Create a new website with Visual Studio 2015

You can simply create one with the default MVC template.

Create a new host on IIS

Open IIS Manager. And then follow this link to set up a new site.

Configure VS to use Local IIS

In VS, open Properties under Solution Explorer. Go to Web tab. Update Servers to use Local IIS. Enter the Project URL you set up in step 3. Add the host binding in hosts file. Now you are ready to run the new site.

Trouble Shootings

If you get blank page, make sure your application pool is using the latest .NET framework. Go to Application Pools in IIS Manager and fix the setting. Or go to your site setting in IIS, check your Handler Mappings have .cshtml. Otherwise, you may need to reinstall .NET framework with this command:

aspnet_regiis -i

Check this link for more info.