Add a website to local IIS7 and browse to it with friendly name

Written by stevey on October 2nd, 2012

Launched IIS7 -> Sites -> Add Web Site
Entered yangsoft.com; left application pool with default name
Mapped to physical path H:\Development\yangsoft.com\Yangsoft.Web
Pick a unassigned port: 8092
Host name: yangsoft.com (hopefully, this will precede the real domain name, once the entry is made into hosts file)
After exiting IIS7, browsed to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and opened the hosts file with notepad
Added this entry: 127.0.0.1 yangsoft.com and saved.
Browsed to http://localhost:8092 but get a bad request error 400: invalid hostname
Returned to IIS7 and changed App Pool Identity “yangsoft.com” to use .net 4.0 and Integrated Mode. By default, whenever a website was first setup, it uses .net v 2.0
Now go to browser and type in :yangsoft.com:8092 and it brought up the local site that is in development folder, not in the deployed folder.
In order to launch the website from VS 2010 IDE in the same fashion, I went into VS2010 web project properties and changed the Servers setting from “Use Visual Studio Development Server” to “Use Local ISI Web server” and pasted in the url: yangsoft.com:8092
Ran the project in debug mode and now the website rendered as http://yangsoft.com:8092/Default.aspx instead of the http://localhost:2236/Default.aspx or whatever random port number the IDE picks for you.

Yang's Notepad