Hosting under Development Website in Visual Studio to show it to someone over Internet

Question

I am new to this one; I am currently developing an application over .Net in visual studio 2010. And I wish to show the ongoing work to my group partner... when I debug my project in visual studio it opens in the browser over something like:

http://localhost:5887

As I wanted to show my partner who is over totally different network at this home I find out my IP address through

Run > cmd >ipconfig

And replaced the ‘localhost’ with my ip address and give that address to my partner to open it, the address is in this form, but he still can’t access it:

http://190.12.12.1:5887

Now I am confused what’s wrong with it … can neone please help me... how I can temporary host my website over my PC and show it to others, I really need it for my project. Thank you! :)

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Just to add: while searching through internet I found out that it could be because of windows firewall blocking the port 80. So I just configured my windows firewall to allow the TCP port 80 through the method specified here Open a port in Windows Firewall.But the problem is still there.

Answer 1

You could push the application to AppHarbor and share the url with your co-worker.

(disclaimer, I'm co-founder of AppHarbor)

Answer 2

I think you might be looking for Hamachi. It's free for the most part that you might need it in. What it does is create a bridge between you and your partner. After installation, you can create a network with a password then give that network's name and password to your partner who will join it on their own Hamachi. After that, you pretty much just use the Hamachi IP instead of your local one.

So in my case, it would have been 5.88.178.160:5887. I've used Hamachi before to play LAN games with friends over the internet so it should be the same as your situation. It pretty much make it seem like you and your partner are on the same LAN.

Answer 3

For sharing a build like that, you'll probably have better luck with using a remote-dekstop technology. Something like Go 2 My PC, of that ilk. You won't be exposing your application to the greater internet for the forces of evil to try and exploit it. Depending on what you're using they may not be able to interact with it, but you can certainly give a demo of what you've built and how the workflow looks.

Answer 4

Unfortunately both IIS Express and the ASP.NET Development Server both do not allow remote access by default.

I am not sure how to enable it on the development server, but, if you want to switch to IIS Express (it is only about three clicks to change if you have it installed), you can follow this guide to enable remote connections (Ignore the Webmatrix parts, it is the same IIS Express component).

However, if you have it available, you can also deploy to a real IIS server - it is a much easier solution to show someone a remote site (and if you are developing, it is a lot easier/better to use this as it stops any unforeseen circumstances when deploying).

All this being said, if you don't want to go down this route, it may be easier to just use a remote desktop type program such as Teamviewer or similar.