How to locally run .Net Core 2.0 app in VS Code the same way Visual Studio does with SSL

Question

So, we have a web app we've migrated to .net core, and while it runs fine in Visual Studio 2017, because Visual Studio uses its "launchSettings.json" file to configure how IIS Express will work/launch - I, for the life of me, cannot figure out how to get VS Code to run the project. The problem is, we use HTTPS only and have always just let IIS Express used the self-signed locahost cert to allow this, so when debugging the site locally, we'd always use https://localhost:44300. As stated, this worked fine when entering this url in the launchSerttings.json file for Visual Studio, but VS Code does not use this, and the only answers I can find on this always refer to having to use the Kestrel Server's .Listen() method and used a self-signed cert and password to allow the use of an HTTPS port. 1) this seems just silly that I'd have to add this "test" code to run it locally, because I don't need it when we deploy to Azure, as Azure manages the certs and url for us. 2) Visual Studio 2017 does not need any specification on Kestrel to make this all work. So, I have hard time believing there isn't some extension, or process to achieve the same thing in Visual Studio Code that Visual Studio is doing under the hood to allow IIS Express to communicate with the .Net Core Kestrel Server.

Combing through the all the documentation suggests that the ASPNetCoreModule is what handles this communication for IIS and Kestrel, so, I would hope/guess there has to be some way to configure the web.config file's tag to include something that would make this work.

I've previously used and tried other IIS execution extensions in VS Code, but those focus on elements in the project's web.config to boot IIS which are no longer present in the web.config due to it being a .Net Core app. I had been successfully running the web app with the IIS Express Executor extension before migrating to .Net Core when the web app was a .NET Framework 4.5.2 app

So, the end goal is that I need to be able to go to https://localhost:44300 in the browser, and have our site work, but I don't want to have to add any sort of test-cert into the Kestrel config in the Program.cs or Startup.cs files. If there's no way to do this, then that will be really disappointing considering Visual Studio makes this seem like it should be very simple.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Was able to get this to work using the following steps.

1) Install IIS Express executer in VS Code or any other similiar extension that wraps around dotnet commands

2) Download Process Explorer from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

3) Launch Visual Studio IIS Express as you would normally

4) Open Process Explorer (may need to launch as Admin) and locate iisexpress.exe -> VSIISExeLauncher.exe

5) Right click VSIISExeLauncher.exe and click properties then locate the "Environment" tab. Inside the environment tab you will see 2 variables: LAUNCHER_PATH and LAUNCHER_ARGS. Copy both of these variables and values.

6) Next locate the configuration file for the extension you installed in VS code (mine is launch.json inside the .vscode folder in your project root directory). It will likely have an "environment" or "env" section for adding environment variables to the launch arguments. Add the two arguments copied from step 5. These vary from person to person so the value of the arguments will be unique to your machine.

7) Launch IIS-Express from vs code. My particular command for this is "IIS-EE: Start IIS Express Server" but will vary based on the extension you installed. You can hit F1 to launch commands.

Answer 2

Visual Studio itself uses too many tricks under the hood to make you believe it is simple. However, it is not.

I documented all necessary details in a blog post,

https://blog.lextudio.com/how-visual-studio-launches-iis-express-to-debug-asp-net-core-apps-d7fd3677e3c3

And if you follow the steps manually, you should be able to launch IIS Express the same way VS does, and then use that in Visual Studio Code. I know there is some VSCode extensions trying to integrate with IIS and IIS Express, but I do hope those authors spend more time learning such integration and improve their extensions to fully support the scenarios.