Exposing your local IIS to network in Windows XP.

Introduction

Hi, in this post I am going to share a simple knowledge about IIS. The knowledge is about how to expose local IIS to network, so that other network users in team can access and use the functionality.

In a web application development team we might want to check our web sites not only in our local pc but also from other team members machine. That's why its necessary to expose IIS to network environment. Lets say we have a web application called "myweb" normally while development if we use iis we access the myweb as "http://localhost/myweb" well it works all the time.

Lets say our developers PC is "MYDeveloperPC" we can expose the local IIS to share with team members as "http://MYDeveloperPC/myweb". If we have windows firewall enabled by default its not exposed to network. so we got to expose it explicitly. Bellow I am providing a simple screen cast.

Step 1:

Go to control panel and open windows Firewall. Now switch to advance tab, now select "Local Area Connection" and click on the settings button. After that advance settings tab will popup.

Step 2:

Bellow the advance settings window is displayed. Now select the services you want to expose to network and click ok to commit. That's it your local iis now exposed to network and your team members can access it from there pc.

Key Notes

Its a relatively pretty simple knowledge, almost every developer knows it. But still I took the liberty to share it because, one day one of our senior developer complained that his IIS can not be accessed out side his pc. Then I showed to him, where to pock.

A things must be considered, this post is related to the problem of windows firewall. If third-party firewall is installed in the developer pc. user must allow in the third-party firewall as well.

Best of luck and happy programming.