There are various ways in which you can host your Web API, and you need not always have to host your Web API in IIS. You can host it in a separate process as well.

I made passing mention of this in the TIL thread but I'm actually trying to figure out how to make this work now. I'm trying to slowly consolidate all of the various applications that have web ...

Helicon Tech, a provider of web server enhancement tools, has released an Apache emulator for IIS 7. Called Helicon APE, it implements .htaccess configurations within the IIS web server.