Multiple Versions of IE with the Visual Studio Built-In Web Server

For years, setting up a web project to run locally on your development machine with Visual Studio (and before that Visual InterDev) required a ton of prerequisites. You had to configure IIS and FrontPage Extensions. You had to have permissions set correctly in order to publish and debug. The setup did not play very well with source control systems and was generally a big nightmare time suck.

In the Java world things were much better much sooner, particularly if all you wanted was a servlet container to run your simple JSP site or to host your Spring POJO application. Back around 2002 or 2003 Netbeans 3 would magically publish your code into Apache Tomcat and let you debug it. You could do something similar with Eclipse and other Java IDEs of the day.

With Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft adopted something very similar to the Java IDE with Tomcat model. Starting with Visual Studio 2005, by default, you get magical publishing to a lightweight web server called webdev.webserver.exe. Webdev.webserver is based on the Cassini sample web server and shares a quirk of Cassini: it only accepts requests from localhost.

Microsoft says that this is for security reasons. They wanted to bundle a web server with .NET 2.0 to make it easier to get started programming but on the other hand they were licking their wounds from the constant successful attacks on Windows XP that had only started to abate with the rollout of SP2. So, Cassini cum webdev.webserver is hardcoded to refuse connections unless they originate from your own computer.

On the face of it that doesn’t seem like much of a problem but here’s the thing. Microsoft has 3 supported web browsers—Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8—and you can only run one of them on a given Windows installation. Furthermore, you cannot run IE6 on Windows Vista and you cannot run IE6 or IE7 on Windows 7. Microsoft’s solution to help out developers is to pass out free copies of Virtual PC and to provide free virtual machine images of Windows running various browser configurations.

Gotcha. You can’t use these virtual machines with Visual Studio’s webdev.webserver. You have to publish to IIS. Ugh!

As the screenshot above may have given away, there is a solution. The key is that all webdev.webserver cares about is that requests originate from localhost. I’ll post all the gory details next time.