How to test subdomains on a development machine? abc.localhost

Question

I am trying to develop an asp.net site with multiple subdomains. I am new to web sites in general, and asp.net in particular. However, it seems that wildcard subdomains are properly setup with a combination of dns entries and web server configuration - which isn't going to happen on my development machine. Therefore I'm manually inserting entries in my windows hosts file:

127.0.0.1  localhost
127.0.0.1  abc.localhost
127.0.0.1  xyz.localhost

However, when I try to interrogate the Request.Url property there is no subdomain to be seen. For example, if I hit http://abc.localhost:1660/ in the browser I get http://localhost:1660/ from Request.Uri.ToString(); the abc is just gone?!

I don't know why the hosts file works like this, but is there any other method I can use to get subdomains into my local web application? Thank you all.

Note that I'm only using the built-in asp.net development server rather than a full iis server. (I can't get access to a full IIS this weekend, but I would still like to know if that would help.)

Answer 1

Don't know about the headers, but one little-known trick that I've used is that all of the 127.* addresses are localhost addresses, not just 127.0.0.1. You can actually run one server listening on 127.0.0.1 port 80, and another webserver instance listening on 127.0.0.2 port 80. So then you'd name 127.0.0.1 localhost, 127.0.0.2 could be abc.localhost (or abc.mydomain.com so you can test the real live URLs against your local webserver), etc.