The iPhone app that I'm writing uses ServiceStack to communicate with an existing ASP.NET MVC app that I've had in production for a long time. The way I have things set up is that I'm doing my iPhone development on MonoTouch on the Mac side, and I use VMWare Fusion to run Windows as a guest OS. This blog will highlight a few of the tips that I found to be handy.

1. Getting IIS Express to work from an external server (even the Mac OS host) is theoretically possible. I found articles lying around the net saying it could work, but it never worked for me. I ended up going back to Cassini (WebDev.WebServer40.exe) and using tcpTrace to listen externally on port 8080 and forwarding to my local port (e.g. 1234).
2. In order to get VMWare Fusion using NAT to talk to my Windows OS on a consistent IP address, I added this section at the bottom of /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf (replacing the MAC address of the Macintosh and the IP address from the Windows machine)

   
   host winguest {
   	hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;
   	fixed-address 172.16.123.123;
   }
   

3. In order to get external devices (e.g. my iPhone connected to the same wireless network) to see in to the Windows OS, I set up port forwarding to route requests coming in to the Mac on port 80 to point to port 8080 on the Windows machine. I did this by modifying this section in /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf:

   
   [incomingtcp]
   80 = 172.16.123.123:8080
   

After all of that, I can communicate from my iPhone through my Mac into the VMWare-hosted Windows machine to get at the data.