ASP.NET Development server not working

by Ravi Tuvar 1:50 AM 0 comments

As you can see your port 8080 (HTTP alternate port) is busy. I suspect that the standard Development Server for VWD 2008 for default works on the same port, differently for example from VS 2005 which random and automatically select one of the unassigned port for you. Well I could uninstall Oracle or stop its XE services on my machine but I needed the DB GUI for another project so I worked round and forced my project to use a Development Server which works on another port and I did this way:

Step 1: Select the “Tools->External Tools” menu option in VS or Visual Web Developer. This will allow you to configure and add new menu items to your Tools menu.

Step 2: Click the “Add” button to add a new external tool menu item. Name it “WebServer on Port 8010” (or anything else you want).

Step 3: For the “Command” textbox setting enter this value: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\WebDev.WebServer.EXE(note: this points to the web-server that VS usually automatically runs).

Step 4: For the “Arguments” textbox setting enter this value: /port:8010 /path:$(ProjectDir) (or any port you like)

Step 5: Select the “Use Output Window” checkbox (this will prevent the command-shell window from popping up.

Once you hit apply and ok you will now have a new menu item in your “Tools” menu called “WebServer on Port 8010”. You can now select any web project in your solution and then choose this menu option to launch a web-server that has a root site on port 8010 (or whatever other port you want) for the project.

You can then connect to this site in a browser by simply saying http://localhost:8010/. All root based references will work fine.

Step 6: The last step is to configure your web project to automatically reference this web-server when you run or debug a site instead of launching the built-in web-server itself. To-do this, select your web-project in the solution explorer, right click and select “property pages”. Select the “start options” setting on the left, and under server change the radio button value from the default (which is use built-in webserver) to instead be “Use custom server”. Then set the Base URL value to be: http://localhost:8010/

Obviously I don't know if this is the problem you had but definitely it is something similar, essentially the problem should be that the same port used by your Development Server is not available because it is already used by another web server.