Using the OWIN HttpListener rather than relying on IIS has been a godsend for many of the applications that we develop. IIS simply has too many knobs that user

Using the OWIN HttpListener rather than relying on IIS has been a godsend for many of the applications that we develop. IIS simply has too many knobs that users can twiddle and break our applications. Running a webserver out of a Windows service, with everything sandboxed and tuned to the needs of our application is much simpler. Plus, no need to rely on Powershell scripts, or god forbid, the user, to get the correct set of IIS features installed has made deployment of our apps infinitely simpler.