But I need a Web server! MS's IIS? Cassini? Asp.Net is server side web development, which means that you need to have a web server in order to build and debug asp.net applications. By default, Delphi 8 sets MS's IIS as your developing/running/debugging platform. If you do not have IIS installed on your development machine, you can use the Cassinni sample web server that ships with Delphi 8. The Cassini Web Server is a sample web server written in C# (.Net), it demonstrates hosting ASP.NET pages using the ASP.NET hosting APIs. As said, Cassini comes with Delphi 8, and its code can be found in "C:\Program Files\Borland\BDS\2.0\Demos\Cassini" depending on your installation folder structure. Don't be frightened with the C# code, after all we need Cassini only as a sample web server for our Asp.Net applications (if you do not have IIS installed, that is). To install the Cassini, you'll need to run the build.bat file in the cassini folder. If you simply run the build.bat you could end up with the "'csc' is not recognized as an internal ..." error - because it assumes that you have both the .Net framework's and the .Net SDK's \bin directory in your environment's path (in order to access the csc C# compiler and the gacutil.exe). The solution is to add "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322" and "C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v1.1\bin" in the System's Path variable, or to change the build.bat. Note that the exact directory path depends on your machine settings (do a search for "csc" and "gacutil").
Once you have Cassini running, you can choose the Cassini as the web server via the Project Options. We'll talk more about that in the later chapters.