I ran into issues today while trying to get Visual Web Developer 2010 Express working. Visual Studio Express 2010 was a fresh install so there should not have been any issues. But for some reason, even after a fresh install, I did the simplest of test only to be greeted by http://localhost unable to connect. I got nothing. I even tried the simplest of files. I typed the word “hello world” in the portion of a standard html document. Still errors. So what did I do to resolved this?

It was simple: Windows\System32\drivers\etc edit the hosts file… and for some reason locallhost had been switched. Delete that one line, and voila, back in business and ready to go!