IIS Express on a shared development machine (rdp) - visual-studio-2010

Question

I have a problem which I thought could be common, searched the web for it but found nothing.
We're using a shared development machine, and every developer connects through RDP and has his own profile, desktop, etc.
The problem I am encountering is with IIS express. Since it is configured at user level (applicationhost.config inside documents/iisexpress/config) and the port configured must match the one declared in the .csproj file, two developers can't possibily run on the same port, as it gives the error "the port is already in use".
So to make it work we have to manually change the port both on the csproj and in the applicationhost.config for every developer, but it's only a temporary fix as when we commit our changes to SVN, the csproj file gets merged, so we have to do this process every time someone commits/updates.
My question is: is there a clean way to use IIS express with Visual Studio 2010 on a shared development machine?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Partially tested answer. Not sure how it'll work on a multi-user workstation. It might give you, or someone else here, a jumpstart to a proper solution that works best in your existing environment.
It appears that Visual Studio stores all the web configuration in the csproj/vbproj and IISExpress stores its configuration in %userprofile%\Documents\IISExpress\config\ApplicationHost.Config.
Normally, we store the csproj files in source control, but ignore the csproj.user file so that each person may have some unique settings, such as the web configuration.
Each user who signs into the box must have their own profile.
Each profile must have their own copy of the source code.
Each user's copy of the source will contain their own csproj.user file.
Ignore .**proj.user* files in your source control.
Copy the web settings into the csproj.user by unchecking the option Apply server settings to all users and then commit to source control.
Each user who pulls a copy of the source will have to configure their web settings, use a unique port that the others users are not using, and uncheck the box above so that their configuration is not passed on to the other users.
Doing this, Each profile will have their own IIS Express ApplicationHost.Config configured with a port that is different from the other profiles. Each user's copy of the source will have a csproj.user that is configured with the same port in their profile's IIS Express configuration.
For reference:
I've tried changing IIS Express's ApplicationHost.Config to use a different port than what Visual Studio expects and Visual Studio is unable to connect the debugger to IIS Express.
How IIS Express's configuration works: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178109.aspx

Answer 2

The best option you can use is to take advantage of the Import functionality built into MSBuild.
Essentially, you would create a seperate build target for each user. You can then import this target from this referenced file directly. I would then recommend creating this file on the server (for each user), but leaving it outside of source control.
This should allow each user to have a custom IIS port without conflicting with others.

Answer 3

I think you can create subdomains for each user and implement the required changes and do the testing. In this way each user can his own subdomain and port and hence work independently on the shared IIS Express.

Answer 4

You probably won't like my answer but here's my thoughts:
As you noticed, the configurations are tied to the user profile and not the server; this is because IIS Express is not intended to be used as a shared development server. You should be using full IIS.
I do not see any benefit or reason to use the same physical box for development. Admittedly, I don't know all the details of your scenario with licensing or workstation resources, but it doesn't seem like you gain much from having everyone RDP into the box to use Visual Studio - each person still needs a license, performance will be slower, and you shouldn't be working on the same project instance.
You should seriously consider your entire setup for development:
Each developer should use Visual Studio on their workstation, and debug/test there using IIS Express (configured with the same ports and settings across all machines - very easy).
From there, your developers should check their code into source control, and examine conflicts that may or may not arise. I'm not sure about SVN but the MSBuild automation available in TFS can be use to setup a continuous build policy that deploys to a common IIS installation so that your merged code is tested and usable from the full IIS installation mentioned above.
Anything else would be a workaround/hack that will bite you in the butt later.