Is There a Way to Make Remote Calls to ASP.NET Development Web Server?

Question

I know that generally speaking, this cant be done, that is get another PC to call a site hosted under the ASP.NET DEvelopment Web Server remotely (generally

Answer 1

Can't you just run IIS7 in Classic Application Pool mode?

The Development Web Server is strictly limited to Localhost, you would either need to decompile and recompile it, or set up some kind of Proxy on your machine.

And on an unrelated Topic: Even though Win2003 Server SP2 R2 should be supported up to March 2012, maybe IIS7 Support should be added to your application to make sure you can run on 2008 Server as well.

Answer 2

This is substantially easier than the Squid option:

"Accessing the Visual Studio ASP.NET Development Server from iPhone"

Also there is an update that works well under Windows 7, too:

"iPhone Accessing the Visual Studio ASP.NET Development Server - Windows 7 Update"

Answer 3

I have just tried http://code.activestate.com/recipes/483732-asynchronous-port-forwarding/ successfully. It's a Python script that just forwards the traffic.

Assuming the machine your dev server runs on is 192.168.42.42 and the dev server is on port 12345, run the script (on the same machine) with the command line arguments

-l 192.168.42.42 -p 8000 -r 127.0.0.1 -P 12345

From a different machine, you can then access the server via http://192.168.42.42:8000.

Be sure to change sender.handle_close as noted by Dwight Walker in the comments:

def handle_close(self):
    self.close()
    if len(self.receiver.to_remote_buffer) == 0:
        self.receiver.close()

Answer 4

Just use a simple Java TCP tunnel. Download this Java app & just tunnel the traffic back. No messing with IIS necessary!

http://jcbserver.uwaterloo.ca/cs436/software/tgui/tcpTunnelGUI.shtml

In command prompt, you'd then run the java app like this... Let's assume you want external access on port 80 and your standard debug environment runs on port 1088...

java -jar tunnel.jar 80 localhost 1088 (Also answered here: Accessing asp. net development server external to VM)

Answer 5

YES THERE IS! :D

I was also looking around to overcome this limitation for some time and accidentally I stumbled upon following article:

http://eeichinger.blogspot.com/2009/12/sniff-http-traffic-with-aspnet.html

I haven't tried it myself yet, but looks quick & simple (although some may say this is hardcore).
BTW. I recommend you look at some other posts at Erich Eichinger's blog, since there's more really valuable stuff.

Answer 6

You might want to take a look at UltiDev's version of the Cassini web server. They took the Microsoft Open Source Cassini web server and enhanced it to allow among other things, remote connections.

You can attach VS to the process, and watch your RESTful APIs being called from the PHP application, exactly as you describe above.