Recently I found myself developing a web page which needed to log a lot of cookie values before redirecting the browser to another part of the customer’s site.
The cookies I needed to access were created under www.company.com, and therefore unavailable to my page when developing under localhost. So, even though I could make sure the cookies were in my browser by visiting www.company.com, it was not possible for my code to read their values during development. Of course, once deployed to the customer’s server it would be part of their domain and the problem would go away.
In order to test the code thoroughly I really needed access to the cookies. A colleague pointed out to me that I could do so simply by modifying my HOSTS file, adding a line similar to the following
127.0.0.1 local.company.com
Having done this, and flushed the DNS cache by issuing ipconfig /flushdns from a command prompt, I could access my page by browsing to http://local.company.com/page.aspx. The cookies were now available because the the code was running under the same domain in which they were created.
As a final touch, you may wish to set the Start Action for the web application project to open up the new URL. Like all good tips this one is simple to implement yet very effective.
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