Connecting to Visual Studio debugging IIS Express server over the lan

Question

I have a test ASP.NET MVC3 application developed in VS2012. When I start debugging the app is accessed from the host machine via the request to http://localhost:

Answer 1

Except to modify the iisexpress configuration file, sometimes you also need to run the command like below.

netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:49419/ user=Everyone

Answer 2

Some of you might spend a lot of time modifying and testing using your %USERPROFILE% directory. If you are running on VS debug, use $(solutionDir).vs\config\applicationhost.config

Answer 3

This is what worked for me:

• Start the IIS Manager
• Add a new virtual directory that points to the projects folder (C:\VSProjects in my case)
• Select the new virtual directory within IIS manager. Select Directory Browsing from the list of options. On the right side there's a Enable button. Click it.

Now I can access my folder and project bin on the network through mypcname\VSProjects\myProj\outputBinViewer.

Answer 4

After the above configurations, I had to run the Visual Studio in Administrative Mode.

Answer 5

Thanks to byteit:

Go to applicationhost.config in Documents/IISExpress/config

find the entry for the particular site you are working on:

add:

<binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:<your site port>:*" />

in front of the existing

 <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:<your site port>:localhost" />

To achieve the solution without having VS2013 create a new website xml entry for you when you restart. You will need to run as administrator.

Answer 6

How to avoid running Visual Studio as an administrator

Using both Garret's and @shangkeyun's answer you can achieve connecting to the running website without needing to run Visual Studio as an admin user:

1. Open %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config
2. Search for your site using name=MySiteName
3. Duplicate the existing <binding> item in the <bindings> section. You should now have two lines with binding.
4. Remove the "localhost" part in bindingInformation.

5. It should now look like this, assuming the port is 12345:

   <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:12345:localhost" />
   <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:12345:" />
   

6. Enable non-admin to bind to port

   netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:12345/ user=Everyone
   

EDIT 2019: gregmac added a step to whitelist the VS instance. I never needed this, but listing it anyway:

7. netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="IISExpress visualstudio app" protocol=tcp localport=12345 dir=in action=allow