Running IISExpress from the command line or Powershell

You don't need to open up Visual Studio just to run another project. You can run IISExpress via the command line instead.

Here is the same example, once for the command prompt and again for Powershell. The name of the site can be found in the applicationhost.config file. You'll see a <site> tag and the name attribute is the siteName. This is also the name that shows up in the system tray when you launch the site in Visual Studio itself.

You can use the system tray IIS Express icon to quit instances started using Powershell or command prompt. You can also type a the letter Q at the command prompt that gets spawned.

Command Prompt

"C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe" /config:"C:\dev\MyMvcApp\.vs\config\applicationhost.config" /site:"MyMvcApp"

You'll need to tweak this to match your paths, etc.

Powershell

$scriptDir = Split-Path $script:MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path

function Start-IisExpress($config, $siteName) {

    Start-Process -FilePath 'C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe' -ArgumentList "/config:$config /site:$siteName"

}

Start-IisExpress -config "$scriptDir\.vs\config\applicationhost.config" -siteName: "MyMvcApp"

NOTE: This assumes that you have put this in a Powershell (.ps1) file and placed it next to your solution and more importantly that the .vs directory is in the same directory as the .ps1 file. If not, you'll need to adjust the path or hard code the full path.