We just installed fresh new copies of DNN 7 on our servers using IIS and tried to install on our Dev machines (deficient of IIS).  We used to use DNN 6.2.  With this latest installation, support was removed for running the application in the VS 2012 IIS Express instance.  I have read the documentation on this and realize that this is a fact.  With version 6.2 we were able to do this.  I was very curious, can someone at DNN report in as to why this decision was made?  Many corporate entities have strict security policies that do not allow running an actual IIS instance locally.  Please explain the thinking process behind pulling support for corporate development to debug DNN locally via IIS Express.

I know it seems like this should be untrue, but sadly DNN support has recognized and reproduced the problem.  We had an open ticket that they closed about 2 weeks ago.  We were told that we have to hire developer support in order to get IIS Expresss to work properly as it is no longer supported out of the box.  Nothing else was mentioned other than IIS Express is no longer supported.  This makes development difficult for us as we cannot install IIS on our development computers.

The issue  boils down to this.  A fresh install can't seem to build the database effectively and it appears unresponsive during the web install.  I have sat for over 12 hours on the install screen running via IIS Express on VS 2012 using DNN 7.x and this is the behavior that has appeared to everyone on my development team as well as the DNN developer support team.  The very same install on our development servers ran without issue using IIS.  So I know that this issue is specifically IIS Express.

Joe,

Thank you for the follow-up on this issue!  Please let me know where things stand as I would love to get the debugger up and running here!