Cassini vs. HttpRequest
Milan points out in Cassini vs. IIS that the Cassini web server, is in fact, not a real web server. It’s true. You’d be completely off your rocker to think you could use it as such. The number of things that you’d forgo (little things like configuration, performance monitoring, recovery, cache handling, fast serving of static files) completely outweighs whatever money you’re saving on a license. So cowboy up and pay the MS tax, or switch to a platform where free is part of the feature list.
The thing I love about Cassini is that you can set up a little test harness for automating testing of things like tricky redirection code. Classes like HttpRequest can’t be mocked (at least not in the testing sense, as they lack public constructors), so you can spin up a little Cassini process with a little self-contained web app to create the conditions you want. I’ve used this in the past to test things like how an aggregator handles redirects. At NewsGator, there was some pretty subtle logic around handling redirects (for example, what do you do when you receive a 302 followed by a 301?), and Cassini gave me a way to set up specific test cases without a terrible amount of effort.
— Gordon Weakliem
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