webrole dev fabric browser launch url instead of IP

Question

When I debug/run a webrole in the dev fabric, it launches a browser instance that goes to the loopback address(http://127.0.0.1/). This is the normal visual studio behavior for debugging a webrole/cloud project.

Is there a way to get the debug/run command in visual studio to have it launch the webrole with an actual hostname like dev.whatever.com, instead of 127.0.0.1

(I have dev.whatever.com as an entry locally in my hosts file. When I manually paste that into the browser, it works fine, and I can debug my webrole project without issue. Just trying to see if I can cut a few clicks out of my code/debug cycle).

Answer 1

When Windows Azure applications runs in compute emulator, the architecture is to launch the application and map the application endpoint with IP address and Ports (In case of multiple instances) to emulate the loadbalancer behavior.

As you were able to change the mapped IP address to a desired IP address however I don't think it is possible to map endpoint to a specific hostname in compute emulator.