do i need to install CF on IIS or standalone will work

my solution to this has been to go the other way. Rather than set up my webroot on a network share, make a network share out of my webroot.

Are you wanting to map to the wwwroot of a production server?

@Simone I would recommend looking into CommandBox. CommandBox is a great CLI tool for ColdFusion development. It has three components, a package manager, a command line tool for CFML written in CFML, but the third and most important to you I think would be its ability to start a CFML server in any directory on your dev box. Once installed you can type

server start

and it downloads, installs, wires up a Lucee server and configures the current directory as the webroot. If you want an Adobe ColdFusion server then the command would be

*server start* cfengine=adobe

. You can also get any version of Lucee or Adobe ColdFusion installed and even start multiple servers in different browser tabs running different engines. It makes CFML development on par with Ruby on Rails, Django, or Node development.