Viewing local site from other computers on the network

This easy solution is turning out to be a huge convenience for me. I run Windows as a VM on my Mac using Parallels Desktop. I want the Windows installation to be as clean as possible, not having to install a lot of browsers to be able to check my code and so forth. 

The Mac OS is where I normally do things, I keep all my non .Net code there and all the developer utility tools I need. So to use the browsers on my Mac side to view what I'm working on in my Windows VS dev environment, this is what I do.

I just use the built in IIS Express while working. This means my settings for the web project in VS looks like this. A random portnumber is given for the localhost. To find this info, right click your web project and choose 'Properties'.

This results in a nice webpage showing up at http://localhost:2686 when i start and run the site.

It also results in the following configuration being made in the applicationHost.config file for IISExpress. This is the part describing which website can be reached on which address. The applicationHost.config is cleverly hidden, usually at {youruseraccount}/Documents\IISExpress\config. You need to open it as an administrator to be able to save your changes. 

Under the <sites>-node you find all the sites currently configured for your IISExpress. The interesting part right now is the binding configuration. This one tells you the site can be found at localhost:2686. That seems about right. But the Mac host, or any other computer on your network can't call localhost:2686 to see the site, they'd just be ending up on their own localhost of course. So this is what we need to fix.

The pattern for the binding is <ipnumber>:<port>:<localhost>. I want to keep the current localhost:2686, that's nice. But I want to add a new binding making sure I can view the site from my Mac. And since I'm calling the windows localhost with win.localhost in other contexts, I add the following line.

Now, to be sure Visual Studio can use this binding, it has to be run in administrator mode. Just start the site up and go to your other machine...

And look at that! Just as beautiful on a Mac. Now... A few things need to be said. The reason I can write win.localhost:2686 on my Mac is because I have that IP-number mapped in my hostfile, like this:

10.211.55.3 win.localhost

And, another reason is that I have opened the Firewall in my VM for incoming calls from the Mac. So those things need to be fixed as well.

If you want to access the localhost from the outside via the IP-number, all you have to do is change the binding in applicationHost.config to the IP-number of your computer on the internal network. Like this, in my case: