New IIS Express Behavior in VS 2013?

If you have been using Visual Studio 2013 for a while, you will notice that it behaves differently from previous versions of Visual Studio when it comes to debugging web applications. Visual Studio 2013 will launch a new instance of IIS Express every time we debug our code and shuts it down at the end of the debugging session.

While this may seem a nice thing to have since a clean instance is started every time, but that wasn't the main purpose of this behaviour and obviously, it will create some problems when dealing with solutions that contains multi-tier projects i.e. a WCF/WF web host where Add or Update Service Reference is required.

In such environment, we usually run the WCF web host in Debug mode while we add service reference from the other projects. In this case, we are no longer able to perform such feat. We can however, workaround it by launching an instance of the host without debugging but after a while, we may encounter situations where this behaviour will become more of an inconvenience.

After some searching, I learned that this was actually caused by the new Edit and Continue feature in x64 environment. Disabling this feature will return Visual Studio 2013 to the previous behaviour of not shutting down IIS Express after debugging.

To disable the feature, simply Right-Click on your Web Host project and select Properties. On the Web tab, un-check the Enable Edit and Continue checkbox.

After disabling the feature, the IIS Express instance will be retained across the debugging sessions.