Search code examples
visual-studiowindows-10visual-studio-2005cassini

Visual Studio 2005: Unable to connect to visual studio's localhost web server


I recently upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and I was unable to debug a web site in Visual Studio 2005. I got the error: unable to connect to visual studio's localhost web server. I don't know if the upgrade caused it to break, but this was previously working.


Solution

  • To resolve this I ran process monitor on devenv.exe to see which calls ended in not SUCCESS. Turns out, my Visual Studio 2005 installation was looking for WebDev.WebServer.exe to be located here:

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

    Whereas it was missing. I copied it over from here:

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\DevServer\9.0

    And it seems to work.

    Across the internet other answers will tell you it needs to be in the .NET framework folder, but I found that in my case it needed to be in the Visual Studio 8 folder.