Testing IIS in Parallels from OSX

If you're running visual studio in Parallels you can set it up to deploy to a virtual directory in IIS then make that site accessible to OS X. This is great for when developing web services or remoting in .Net with Flex Builder in OS X. You can also assign an alias to your windows IIS server meaning you don't have to remember the IP address of the Parallels VM.

Setup Visual Studio to deploy to IIS Virtual Directory

By default since VS 2005, when you run a website project it will execute in the built-in web server in visual studio. You can however set it to deploy to your windows version of IIS by doing the following:

Goto your web project's properties (right click the project in the solution explorer and hit properties),

Select the "Web" tab,

In the Servers section select "Use IIS web server",

Enter a name for your project and hit the "Create Virtual Directory" button.

When you run or debug your site it will now use IIS instead of the built-in web server.

Run IIS website from OSX

You'll need to do a couple of things before you can run your IIS deployed website in OS X, firstly you need to enable remote access to the site and secondly you need to find the IP address of your parallels VM.

Go to Control Panel, Adminsitrative Tools, Internet Information Services,

Expand your Computer node and right click on the websites folder and click Properties,

In the Directory Security tab click the annonymous access Edit button,

Check the box titled "integrated windows authentication".

Now to test your site, open a comand prompt in windows and type ipconfig to find out your windows VM address. Then in OS X open your browser and enter http://[your.ip.address]/yourVirtualDir/ and you shoudl see your asp.net website running.

Setup an alias instead of remembering the IP address

I found this out from a comment on Andy Jarrett's blog, use the following command from terminal to use a more friendly name to access your IIS webserver (replacing 'localhostwin' with your chosen alias and IP address with your XP's IP:

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/localhostwin IPAddress 10.23.0.1

Here's the rest of the comment which has some other useful commands:

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys IPAddress 192.168.0.1

Enter your password when asked, and you can now ping 192.168.0.1 with the name ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

You can see the results of your work with:

dscl localhost -readall /Local/Default/Hosts

And to undo your handy-work:

sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/ridiculous.nonsense.monkeys

P.S. You can see the results of your BSD flat-file method with this command:

dscl localhost -readall /BSD/local/Hosts

# Posted By j0no | 11/11/07 8:01 PM