Crazy thing that I’ve been putting off diagnosing – the inability to debug/test without debugging since the installation of vista on my home PC.

I could debug on my other computers, so I just would switch to them, but today I finally decided to see what I could do about the issue.

What I was experiencing was somehow a sort of lack of connectivity to the host, even though it was on something similar to: Localhost:50234/default.html

Cannot connect to self?  That’s odd.

My thoughts were beginning to come around to the memory of the initial setup of the development tools onto the computer.  The .net framework was already part of the installation which had a 2-sided thought process to me, that’s either really cool or really not so cool.

Everything else installed cleanly without issues, so I just moved along.

I’ve finally come to the conclusion that there’s something to the installation that is not included by default with windows vista – and that would be some of the base administrative tools, including IIS for local hosting of web services.

Sure enough – I am finding that I need to add that as an additional feature.

So if you are having the same issue where you are testing your silverlight application or ASP.net site from Visual Studio, and IE reports that it cannot connect, then head over to the control panel, open the programs and select the “Turn Windows features on or off” and get IIS.  While doing that, don’t forget to enable various features, such IIS Management console, WWW Services, and the various IIS6 management settings.  Just selecting the box for IIS won’t install the necessary items needed for serving localy hosted ASP.net services.

 Update: I still wasn’t able to get anything to run from Visual Studio.  I could go straight to localhost/ and see that IIS 7 was running, but anything at all run using the ASP.net Dev Server would return a failed connection attempt.  *sigh*

Finally I located information regarding a recent response made by Microsoft to a high threat trojan.  Their response was to wipe out the IP address information of the LocalHost.

So to fix this, I located and modified the hosts file.  In most computers, this should be in %windowsdir%>system 32>drivers>etc>hosts.  Updated it in a notepad entry and added the local host IP back to this file to result in 127.0.0.1 as instructed by Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center’s article.

Testing… YAY!  My silverlight apps now run!