When you develop web projects in Visual Studio, you need a web server to test or run them. Visual Studio lets you test with different web servers, including IIS Express , Internet Information Services (IIS), External Hosts, or Custom Web Servers By default, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 use IIS Express. IIS Express is installed automatically when you install Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013. If you want to install IIS Express in Visual Studio 2010 (SP1 is required), you can use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Reference: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/58wxa9w5(v=vs.120).aspx