James Skemp's StrivingLife

Under seemingly new ownership, Cassini 4.0 has been released, via Google Code.

Since a download isn't available, a link to a built version is included below.

Download Cassini 4.0, based on revision 4.

Visit Cassini on Google Code to see the nice new interface and functionality. Of major importance is that it supports .NET Framework 4.

Tested on a Windows 7 Home Premium, 64-bit, machine.

Note on building it yourself

To save you some time, if you want to build a copy yourself open the project properties and on the Build tab check "Allow unsafe code." You should otherwise have no issues.

Cassini is the product of Dimitry Robsman, and allows ASP.NET applications to be run without a full-fledged instance of IIS.

While Cassini should not be used in production environments, it's more than enough to run for minor development, or even minor projects.

The last official version of Cassini at the time of this writing is 3.5.0.2. Since he's released the source, you can build your own, but what if you just want to download a pre-built version? Well now you can.

Download Cassini 3.5.0.2.

While tempted, I've made no modifications. I have included a simple batch file (_startCassini.bat) however that allows you to copy this and the Cassini executable to a directory, and start Cassini from that directory. This also allows you to distribute your projects to others to run in a test environment. (I believe ELMAH uses something like this, but I kept, and keep, neglecting to look at how he implemented it.)

The batch file is simply the following:

Cassini-v35.exe "%cd%"

Cassini does support additional arguments, which is documented in the ReadMe.txt. The MS-PL license is also included in the zip.

You may also be interested in Cassini++ (I haven't looked into this project) and you'll want to have the current version of the .NET Framework installed.

While Cassini is a built-in Web server part of Microsoft Visual Studio, it's also available as a stand-alone application, thanks to the work of Dmitry Robsman.

The current version can be downloaded from this post regarding version 3.5.0.2 but requires that you first build the solution (the code is available under a MS-PL license).

Cassini++ is also available from Codeplex, and has GUI improvements, among other changes (but is based on an older 3.5 version of Dmitry's release).

I decided to start with Dmitry's release and downloaded and built the application. Since I'm looking into building extensions for BlogEngine.NET (to work against some spam issues and for general knowledge), as well as wanting to work on themes, I decided to see if I could get BE working on Cassini.

And it does, right out of the box (version 1.5.0.7).

On a Windows XP Professional box memory usage jumped to approximately 100 MB (which is about what I see on my own blog, with a little over 780 posts). On my Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) machine, however, memory usage sat under 40 MB.

Either way, I was able to login just fine.

Next I'll probably see if I can get an MVC Web site up and running on Cassini as well.