Local proxies with IE7 – Solved

This has been bugging me …

IE7 always bypasses the proxy when connecting to localhost, irrelevant of what options you choose. This makes life painful if you’re trying to use some like Fiddler when developing a site locally.

If you’re hosting locally with IIS, you can just connect using http://machinename/ instead of http://localhost/.

Unfortunately we don’t have this flexibility with Casini (the one included with VS 2005) as it only accepts connections to http://localhost:xyz/.

Today, I came across the solution thanks to Dominick Baier!

Use http://localhost.:xyz/ (notice the added period between the hostname and the colon).

• IE7 is no longer sure if it’s local or not, so we get the proxy,
• it still gets routed correctly, and
• Casini still accepts the connection.