external local testing with Azure & IIS Express

Question

I'm in the process of testing an Azure website using IIS Express. The problem is that I would like to be able to access my testing role from another system. I'n general I have found a few suggestions that I can allow access to IIS Express by doing the following:

Modify the applicationHost.config file with the following information:

            <bindings>
                <binding protocol="https" bindingInformation="*:443:*" />
                <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:81:" />
            </bindings>

However, when debugging an Azure website with IIS Express a new applicationHost.config file gets generated everytime I launch the debugger and my settings get overwritten. Does anyone know of a way I can get IIS Express to allow external connections via Azure debugging?

Answer 1

It took me forever to find a solution to this but the following URL solved the problem for me: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/remotely-accessing-the-windows-azure-compute-emulator/

To summarize my azure web role was being hosted on localhost:12153. Per the instructions of the aforementioned link I used the following command to add port forwarding:

netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=8099 connectaddress=127.0.0.1 connectport=12153 protocol=tcp

Lastly I had to add in/out rules for port 8099 to windows firewall. I can now access my azure web role from other machines on my local network using the local IP on port 8099.

No messing around with applicationhost.config or the project settings required!