[anton_gogolev]

Oh, don't get me started on this whole Katana/OWIN disaster. Just look at all these dependencies that are required to self-host ASP.NET application. How they managed to complicate things so much -- I don't know.

NancyFX all the way.

[jammycakes]

One point to note here: OWIN and Katana are two separate components. OWIN is the community-driven underlying abstraction layer which doesn't specify any dependencies; Katana is a Microsoft-driven library of statically typed wrappers around it that completely abstracts it out altogether and leaves you with a bunch of tutorials and blog posts that don't look anything even remotely like the OWIN spec. It's all very confusing.

I wrote a blog post about it a while ago trying to untangle the difference between the two in some detail: http://jamesmckay.net/2014/08/sorting-out-the-confusion-that...

[WDCDev]

Yeah I am not so sure I would serve content using Katana. I am using it to horizontally scale out data services used by clients around the world, hosted in Azure. It's simple to deploy and manage. I also don't have to mess with IIS, which is always a plus given how few admin resources we have to maintain our environment.