I am running Visual Studio on my local Windows Server webdev machine. This launches an ASP.NET Development Server when I run my website.
I need to test this in various versions/browsers/tools and thus I'd like to access it from a VM, without having to deploy it each time I want to test something.
Therefore: is there a way to access my local ASP.NET server from my VM?
Can I use a reverse proxy or something for this? If so how? Why can I access the IIS7 welcome page but not the instance of my webserver on specific port?
Cheers
Edited to differentiate Cassini ASP.NET Dev. Server and IIS7.
I found a way to do this using Fiddler.
Basically you just create a reverse proxy on the dev. machine like so:
if (oSession.host.toLowerCase() == "192.168.0.100:8888") oSession.host = "localhost:41111";
Where my ASP.NET dev server (from VS2010) is running on localhost:41111 and I access it from other machines on the local network (or VMs) using 192.168.0.100:8888 (mydevhostip:8888) in a browser.
Related
I am working on a small website based on an example ServiceStack project. It is a standalone web app so that there is no need for IIS etc. Currently I start the server at http://localhost:8080 and opening the website in my local browsers seems to work fine.
My PC has a dedicated IP and I hope to test my server from another computer. I can successfully get a Python server running using python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000, so network is working fine.
But the remote computer cannot access my ServiceStack server. I think there should be a simple setting somewhere to get it working. But I searched online, there is much information about IIS and ASP.Net. But my app is standalone and is independent of Asp.net. It is supposed to be running on Linux as well as on Windows. (Though I will only deploy on a Windows machine now.)
It will work fine on your local computer because the firewall doesn't block local traffic. If you want any other computer to access services running on your machine you will need to open the ports on the firewall.
This can be configured from the Windows Firewall in Control Panel
I thought I would just replace the localhost with my computer and it will work but it does not:
http://10.90.108.66/MyWebApplication/Default.aspx
How can I make it work so I can share the url?
Are you using cassini/the visual studio web development server?
if so, this doesn't accept remote connections, you'll have to host it in an instance of IIS
Microsoft recommends testing older versions of IE with the following virtual machines
This is all fine and good, except that the virtual machines can't see the Dev Server from Visual Studio. This makes it very difficult to develop or debug since I have to copy or deploy to IIS for every little change I make. I've tried using ARR, but it seems it can only forward to one specific port at a time, whereas i need to have the port typed in the address bar of the virtual machine to match the port that it is connecting to on the host machine. Is this possible?
You shouldn't need to deploy to IIS to test changes.
We set our IIS up on development machines to point to the web project folder.
Once IIS is setup, you can add an existing website to your solution, select Local IIS and select the Site from the list of sites (rather than browsing the file system and selecting a .csproj file). You'll now have your site in VS that is hosted by IIS, ready to change and debug, and accessible from remote machines.
Generally speaking you cannot access the ASP.NET Development Server on one machine from another.
Here's some additonal notes on what you cannot do with ASP.NET Development Server from MSDN
ASP.NET Development Server is specifically built to serve, or run, ASP.NET Web pages under the local host scenario (browsing from the same computer as the Web server). In other words, the ASP.NET Development Server will serve pages to browser requests on the local computer. It will not serve pages to another computer. Additionally, it will not serve files that are outside of the application scope. The ASP.NET Development Server provides an efficient way to test pages locally before you publish the pages to a production server running IIS.
The ASP.NET Development Server works only with individual pages and does not include the extra facilities of IIS. For example, the ASP.NET Development Server does not support an SMTP mail server. If your Web application involves sending e-mail messages, you must have access to the IIS SMPT virtual server to test e-mail because the ASP.NET Development Server cannot forward e-mail messages or invoke a server that does.
Anyway.....
Googling around I have found an article where somebody had success on accessing a Development Server remotely using a reverse proxy. I have not tried but here's the link
Configuring a Basic Reverse Proxy in Squid on Windows (Website Accelerator)
Also have a look at this StackOverflow question that has answers describing varous methods to achieve your results
Is There a Way to Make Remote Calls to ASP.NET Development Web Server?
You need to type the development server port into the address bar of the client browser, otherwise host the application in IIS and use the default port.
It is overkill to test with this number of configurations in the development environment. It is generally sufficient to test with 2 or 3 configurations while you are writing code (say IE8, FireFox) - just run these from the local machine (no need for a virtual machine). Once you've finished the UI, deploy your application to a test environment running IIS and test it against the larger range of configurations.
If you test each small change against all of these configurations as the change is made, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with testing. Don't forget that as well as the MS recommended test environments, various configurations of other browsers and operating systems (such as FireFox and Opera, Mac OS) are equally important - you may choose to only test a subset of these configurations depending on your resources.
I too found the link Lorenzo mentions in his comment, but had no luck with Squid configuration.
Happily there's a much easier method, as noted here.
Go to CNET and download SPI Port Forwarder
(Note: Click the "Direct Download Link" below the big green "Download Now" button. If you use the Download Now button CNET tries to install adware on your machine before giving you the file. It's very odd.)
In the first column, "Local Port" put the port you want people to connect to your machine on. I wanted people to come in on 80.
Second column, "Remote host", put "localhost" (it'll apparently port-forward to other machines).
Third column, "Remote port", put the port of the local webserver (in my case the ASP.NET Development Server on port 2485).
Click "Activate"
Hope this helps.
I am answering this old question to help peoples who wants to make it work without IIS. Thank you Fiddler !
1. First Step
You have to download Fiddler.
Once Fiddler is downloaded and installed, open it.
Go in Tools-> Fiddler Option-> Connection tab-> And check "Allow remote computers to connect" :
Restart Fiddler.
2. Second Step
After this, in the VM, open internet explorer-> Internet Options-> Connection Tab-> Lan Settings-> Check "Use a proxy server for your LAN" :
The adress is the IP adress of your DEV machine.
And put the port 8888
Now, you can access the ASP.NET Web Server from your VM !
To access it -> http://localhost.:54814
Don't forget the additional point after "localhost" !
The port, "54814" in my case, is the ASP.NET Web Server port.
My asp.net web app is hosted on this URL on my local machine:
http://localhost:45433/
I want to access the same application from a different computer on the network. I tried replacing the localhost with my IP but it did not work.
any ideas!
UPDATE 1:
Now, I am getting this error:
Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.
If your application is hosted using Visual Studio's built in web development server then this server does not allow remote connections. It is for testing purposes only and accepts connections only from localhost. In order to access your application from remote clients you might need to deploy it to IIS.
First, add the application as a virtual in IIS, and as long as you can access the machine on the network, you can do:
http://<machine name>/<virtual>
I do that at work, where I can access my co-worker's web site.
HTH.
That looks a lot like a url used by the development web server in visual studio. That web server only responds to requests from the localhost. It won't work for other requests from other machines on your network.
You need to install IIS on your machine (must be a Pro version of Windows) and deploy to that IIS install to share your app on the network.
I don't think the built-in version of Cassini (VS debug server) allows remote connections.
However, the UltiDev version, built off of the same code base with a few enhancements, does, and is a much lighter-weight install than IIS (especially if you can't find your OS install DVD). It also integrates nicely with Visual Studio for debugging purposes.
Im testing an ASP.NEt site. When I execute it, it starts the ASP.NET Development Server and opens up a page.
Now I want to test it in the intranet I have.
Can I use this server or I need to configure IIS in this machine?
Do I need to configure something for it to work?
I've changed the localhost to the correct IP and I opened up the firewall.
Thanks
Yes you can! And you don't need IIS
Just use a simple Java TCP tunnel. Download this Java app & just tunnel the traffic back.
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)
No, you can't. It's set up so it only works on localhost, and I couldn't find any workarounds to make it work.
But, here's what I've been doing - I created the website on a specific port in IIS and opened that port up so it's visible on the network. I pointed that IIS website to my website's root folder (the one with web.config in it). Then I continued to use the ASP.NET Development server on that local machine while developing - both IIS and the ASP.NET Development Server can access the files at the same time (unless you're doing something wacky).
Let me know if there's a challenge with running IIS on your machine and I'll update my answer.
I realize this isn't a direct answer to your question, but an alternative to debugging using the ASP development server is to attach to the IIS process: How do I attach the debugger to IIS instead of ASP.NET Development Server?
Nope, stupidly (IMHO) there's no way to get the default ASP.net development server to serve pages to IPs other than localhost. What I did was to use UltiDev Cassini which is very quick to set up and is basically a version of the ASP.net development server compiled by UltiDev, and it will serve pages to any IP address.
Just for those who don't want/cant set up IIS for whatever reason...
Use fiddler or similar on your host - set your browser on the client VM to use the proxy then just use localhost:dev_port as usual on the client.
All requests from the client goto the proxy on your dev machine which routes to localhost on the dev machine and the ASP.net dev server thinks the request is from your dev machine!
You can recompile Cassini to get it to work - there's a fairly easy to remove check for localhost in there. Or, I'm pretty sure Ultidev's Cassini doesn't have this restriction. Both of these are easier to setup than IIS.
But, yeah, the builtin WebDev.WebServer doesn't work....Hmm, unless you run something like AnalogX's Proxy on your dev box and point it to the WebDev port. That should work (though I haven't tried it, it should take < 2 mins to setup).
You can use Cassini to expose your web apps externally. You just need to proxy the connection. I wrote a simple program to do this that you can run in another VS instance. Just change the port to match the port Cassini is using.
https://gist.github.com/945649
You can do port redirection using SOAP Toolkit 3.0
Once installed, go to My Programs > Microsoft Soap Toolkit 3 > Trace Utility
Once Trace Utility opened, go to File > New > Formatted Trace
In the dialog insert your ASP .NET Development Server port in Forward To Destination Port field.
It's only a workaround for testing purposes
I believe the built in ASP.NET server only works on localhost. You'll have to use IIS.
Compile all you website in Debug mode, then create the website and publish it in IIS (make sure you can view it from other machine). Then attach the VS2010 Debugger to the process with the AppPool of your website (the process is called w3wp.exe when IIS>v5 and aspnet_wp.exe when IIS<5).
If you make some changes, just replace the package contents on the physical path of the website, and there you go again.