.net – Remote machines cannot connect to Visual Studio web server

asp.netnetvisual studiovisual-studio-2008

I remember when MS was developing Cassini – I believe they rolled it into VS 05/08, so I think this is a Cassini web server question.

I am using Windows XP with Visual Studio 2008, and find it quite inconvenient when I want to test a web page/styling with multiple browsers and multiple OSes. Right now I have to deploy the code on our server, and if there are any updates that need to happen, the process turns into quite a time drain. Since I am using XP/IIS 5, the option of using IIS is not an option. The use of IIS on XP requires an extra prefix for a project, which breaks all links, css etc. This was also a really quick development project so things like root dir that should be pulled out to config aren't, I am quite on board with this type of solution but it wasn't implemented in this project. It also seems really sketchy that MS wouldn't allow a simple flag somewhere to allow remote connections – its quite simple (http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/11711) but I don't want to recompile Cassini.

Does anyone know how to allow the integrated development web server in Visual Studio 2008 to be seen by other computers? This would save loads of time.

Best Answer

just figured out a good solution: 1) Set up fiddler on development machine 2) Set up remote machine to use fiddler as proxy 3) browse to http://localhost.:[insert your dev port # here]/ on remote machine