Introduction

When you make changes to your site in Visual Studio, you want to know the effect those changes have on file sizes, both before and after compression. Unfortunately, the Cassini development server included with Visual Studio doesn't support compression. So you'll need to use IIS instead of Cassini during development.

Making this happen involves a simple five-step process:

1. Install IIS 7;
2. Enable compression;
3. Create a development site in IIS;
4. Run Visual Studio in administrator mode;
5. Modify your project so it uses the development site.

Lets do these steps one by one.

Install IIS 7

1. Follow these steps to install IIS on Vista or Windows 7:
2. Click on Start | Control Panel | Programs | Turn windows features on or off.
3. Check Internet Information Services.
4. Expand the Internet Information Services node, expand Web Management Tools, and make sure IIS Management Console is checked. This will allow you to run the IIS Manager.
5. Expand IIS 6 Management Compatibility and make sure IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility is checked. You need this to be able to use IIS from Visual Studio.
6. Expand the World Wide Web Services node and then the Application Development Features node. Make sure that ASP.NET is checked so that the server can run ASP.NET applications.
7. Still under World Wide Web Services, expand Performance Features, and make sure Http Compression Dynamic is selected. This enables the server to compress .aspx files.
8. Also under World Wide Web Services, expand Security and make sure Windows Authentication is selected. You need this to be able to use IIS from Visual Studio.
9. Click on OK. Windows will take a while to implement the changes.

Enable compression

You've seen how to do this in part 1 of this series. Here is a recap:

1. Open IIS manager. Click on Start | Control Panel. Type admin in the search box. Click on Administrative Tools and double-click on Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. Click on your machine. Then double-click on the Compression icon on the right-hand side. The compression window opens.
3. Enable compression for dynamic content and/or static content; the same settings you apply in your production environment. Click on Apply to enable compression.

Create a development site in IIS

Create a site in IIS to use from Visual Studio:

• While still in IIS Manager, expand your machine. Right-click on Sites and choose Add Web Site. The Add Web Site dialog opens.
• Make up a site name. As the physical path, enter the root folder of your source files, that is, the one with default.aspx and web.config. Enter a port that isn't already in use, for example 1080 and click on OK.

• Enable Windows Authentication. Double-click on your new site, double-click on Authentication, right-click on Windows Authentication, and choose Enable.

Run Visual Studio in administrator mode

To use Visual Studio with IIS, you need to run Visual Studio in administrator mode. If you are not normally logged in as administrator, right- click on Visual Studio and choose Run as administrator.

To make things easier, you could also create a shortcut to Visual Studio and on the Compatibility tab of the Shortcut Properties, select Run this program as an administrator.

However, this may stop you from opening a solution file by double clicking it. The problem is caused by the Visual Studio Version Selector, which is in charge of opening the correct version of Visual Studio based on the solution file (VS 2010, VS 2008, etc.) The solution is here.

Modify your project so it uses the development site

Finally, swap Cassini for IIS in your project. How to do this depends on whether you use a website or a web application.

If you use a website:

• Run Visual Studio as administrator. Right-click on the website and choose Start Options. The Property Pages window opens, with the Start Options tab selected.
• In the Server section, select Use custom server. In the Base Url field, enter the localhost address with the port you entered when you created the development site in IIS manager:

• Click on OK.

If you use a web application:

• In Visual Studio, right-click on the web application and choose Properties. The Properties window opens.
• Click on the Web tab.
• Scroll down to the Servers section and select Use Local IIS Web server. In the Project Url field, enter the localhost address with the port you entered when you created the development site in IIS manager.
• Save the properties.

To see more options such as using Visual Studio with a remote IIS 7 Server, visit here for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 or here for Visual Studio 2005.

Be aware that if you use output caching, when you refresh a page, the server will get the page from cache and your breakpoints won't be hit.

Measure the size of your pages

In part 1, you already saw how to measure the actual size of your compressed pages as they will travel over the Internet to the browser, using the Web Developer add on for Firefox or Google Chrome. This gives you lots of information about a web page, including the compressed and uncompressed sizes of the files making up page page. In case you haven't installed Web Developer yet, here are the instructions again for Firefox:

1. Using Firefox, visit http://chrispederick.com/work/web- developer to download and install the Web Developer add on.
2. After you have installed Web Developer, load the page you are interested in using Firefox.
3. Right click anywhere in the page. A popup menu will appear. Click Web Developer | Information | View Document Size. A new window appears showing the groups of files making up the page.
4. Expand the Documents group to see the main html file. You will see its size. If it was compressed while travelling over the Internet, you will also see its compressed size.
5. For more information, expand the Scripts and Style Sheets groups as well.

Summary

In this article we saw how to use IIS 7 with Visual Studio in your development environment. This allows you to use compression while your new web pages are under development, so you can keep track of their actual size as they will travel over the Internet to the browser.

In the next article, we'll address some miscellaneous topics related to compression, such as how to make your pages more compressible.

If you enjoy this series and want to know the full story on how to improve ASP.NET site performance, from database server to web server to browser, consider my book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets. Or visit my web site ASP.NET Performance.

About Matt Perdeck

Matt has over 6 years .NET and SQL Server development experience. Before getting into .Net, he worked on a number of systems, ranging from the largest ATM network in The Netherlands to embedded software in advanced Wide Area Networks. He has lived and worked in Australia, The Netherlands, Slovakia a... This author has published 4 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.