Remote machines cannot connect to Visual Studio web server

Question

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 Vi

Answer 1

Sorry for answering an old question, but it ranks in Google so I decided to add my 2 cents:

In VS 2010 there's an option to use "IIS Express" instead of VS Development Server, which allows remote connections by default.

UPDATE: current version of IIS Express does not allow external connections by default, see HERE on how you can enable remote connections.

Answer 2

Using Fiddler as reverse proxy, development web server could get the request, but it becomes internal request (127.0.0.1), which is useless in my case.

I'm trying to catch remote request to debug it on there.

Answer 3

I test against multiple browsers on my local box. The local web server doesn't care whether you use Opera/Safari/Firefox/IE to connect to it. Typically I fire up the project in the debugger, which also starts IE, then cut/paste the URL from IE into whatever browser I'm testing with. Typically, the port Cassini chooses doesn't change often, so a lot of times the URL is already there in my browser history. Once the web server is running, you can even stop the debugger and continue to test in the alternate browser.

For other MacOS, I typically publish to a QA server with IIS6. I've found very few cases where after testing with IE/Firefox/etc. on WinXP, there were problems on the Mac. I don't specifically test variants of Linux.

Answer 4

Try binding .Net to 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost, it actually does make a difference with the resolution in some cases I encountered. I wish I had known that all along, would have saved me a number of hours.

I've also seen Privoxy used, which may be faster, but Fiddler is far easier and doesn't require setting up a loopback.

Anyways, I have VS setup on localhost:15709 and this in Fiddler: if (oSession.host.toLowerCase() == "webserver:15709") oSession.host = "localhost:15709";

So I just type webserver:15709 in my VM an it works great.

Answer 5

WebMatrix is another alternative.

Answer 6

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