Dave Ward did a good post recently on how to use the Visual Studio development server from a mobile devise such as an iPhone. But there’s a problem for us here, we use Charles which I have found to be a better than Fiddler (it’s also cross-platform so I can use it both on my Mac and Windows machines).

So after reading Dave’s post I decided to have a look at how to do it if you’re using Charles, and well it’s pretty darn simple.

I’d suggest that you read Dave’s post first as I’m going to assume that you have, I’m just going to point out what you need to do different for Charles.

Charles Configuration

The first thing you need to do is find out on what port Charles is running on, by default Charles is on port 8888, but you can find the settings under Proxy > Proxy Settings

Next we need to configure the external access to the HTTP Proxy that Charles is running. This is something that Charles handles differently to Fiddler, it’s actually a lot more configurable as you can define individual IP’s or IP ranges for access.

To do this you need to navigate to Proxy > Access Control Settings

Then you just need to click Add and enter the IP (or range) which you want to allow access to. I’ve just allowed access to the IP of my iPhone, which is 192.168.1.44.

Conclusion

The rest of Dave’s post is all you need to get this working, you connect to your computer from your external device in just the same way.

Hopefully this helps you out if you’re not a Fiddler user but want to be able to use a mobile device with Visual Studio’s development server.