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My web service runs on for example: http://mydomain.com/mywebservice.asmx. This works great, but I have a PDA application which I want to debug it synchronising through this web service. Currently the only way I can do this is to debug the webservice running on the actual server which is far from ideal.

What I would like to do is for any device connecting on my wireless network, if it requests mywebservice.asmx for this to forward the request to my development PC and for IIS to then handle the request and allow me to debug in Visual Studio.

So device on the network that requests the hostname: mywebservice.asmx will his this PC..

I am at a loss to set this up on my router (Zoom ADSL X6), this is massively out of my scope but any help would be much appreciated

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3 Answers

Looking into it further, Windows Mobile (6.1+ at least) doesn't have a hosts file, instead you would have to make registry entries unless you use a program called HostsFileEditPro.exe / HostsFileEditStd.exe


Check this link to download it, it manages the registry entries for you.. The problem is I've tried this and it doesn't work, although looking at the blog post it does for everyone else.. Unfortunately I have run out of time to investigate further but I will update this thread if I get anywhere..

When I try to hit my hostname entry in say Opera Mobile it just says error.. I've tried: mydomain.com and http;//mydomain.com but to no avail.

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On the outside chance your PDA has an /etc/hosts file, just change that to so mydomain.com points to the IP address of your test-server.

Otherwise, you could change the DNS server address in your PDA to point to your 'special' DNS server which would override the the address of mydomain.com (but simply forwards other requests).

You could do this on your entire wireless network (if there are no live users on that network), by changing your DHCP server for the wireless to provide the DNS address of your 'special' DNS server.

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At first I thought you'd need split DNS, but can't you change the web service URL in your PDA to http://your.devmachine.local/webservice.asmx or http://dev.machine.ip.address/webservice.asmx?

If it's using your internal DNS server (I'm assuming the PDA is getting an IP from the DHCP server just like every other machine on your network, and in turn, is getting your DNS server) it'll resolve no problem.

Now if the PDA is using 3G and is actually outside your network, you'll need to setup http://dev.mydomain.com and have that port forward to your development machine.

Finally, alot of PDAs (I know Blackberry does) have "simulators" that run as a local application and behave exactly as the real PDA would: I used one for doing Web development for a Blackberry.

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