How to remotely connect to ASP.Net Development Server

The ASP.Net Development Server (webdev.webserver.exe), which is included with Visual Studio, is used when testing web applications locally when IIS isn’t installed. The ASP.Net Development Server will only serve pages to browser requests on the local computer, so a colleague of yours cannot have a look at what you’re doing, since ASP.Net Development Server will not serve pages to another computer.

In order to remotely connect to the ASP.Net Development Server a proxy must be used that accepts remote connections and proxies traffic to and from the ASP.Net Development Server.

I searched the internet for a suitable proxy but I couldn’t find one that is small and easy to use (ok, I admit, I didn’t search that long :-) so I wrote one based on proxy code from http://www.mentalis.org/soft/projects/proxy/.  It’s probable not the most elegant piece of code ever written but it will have to do.

To start the proxy just pass the port number to it:

Proxy.exe 62200

Incoming traffic to port 80 (standard http port) is proxied to 62200, so if your computer’s name is YourComputer, your colleague can connect on the url: http://YourComputer/

To listen to another port than 80, specify it as the second argument:

Proxy.exe 62200 15555

Incoming traffic to port 15555  is proxied to 62200, so the url will be: http://YourComputer:15555/

Download

Download executable and source here:
http://cid-1591ce8777facfb4.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/Code/Proxy