How to create a shortcut to some page and forcing it to be opened with Internet Explorer (not default browser)

Scott Guthrie has made a post on how to change Visual Studio's default browser:

1) Right click on a .aspx page in your solution explorer

2) Select the "browse with" context menu option

3) In the dialog you can select or add a browser. If you want Firefox in the list, click "add" and point to the firefox.exe filename

4) Click the "Set as Default" button to make this the default browser when you run any page on the site.

I however dislike the fact that this isn't as straightforward as it should be.

I've done something similar to this, sadly it was last year, and I'm not at the same campany any more to be able to reference my code to give full solution. What we ended up doing essentially was to use a URL that was for a pdf, but had an http module picking up those requests and dealing with them as required.

Edit - when I say http module, it may have been an http handler or something. Like I said, it was a while ago. The general point is that it was some code that fired as the request came in to the server, before being direct to a page, so our something.pdf was spotted and the data was thrown back at the caller and it just seemed like it was reading a static pdf from the server.