Sharing Web Apps Using Dev Tunnels In Visual Studio 2022

Sometimes we want to share what we are doing, the changes that we are performing, or a proof of concept with others. To do this, we need to publish our app or share the screen with others and show step-by-step what we are doing and how it works. Ngrok is an application for this scenario; it's petty simple to use and free with some limitations.

In Visual Studio 2022, we have now the possibility to share quickly our web application with a https public URL.

Since this is a preview feature in Visual Studio we need to navigate to Tools -> Manage preview features

And check the option "Enable dev tunnels for web applications"

After that in our ASP.NET core web application, we need to open launchsettings.json and add 2 properties to the general profile to include now the functionality to open the application using dev tunnels, or you can also create a new profile.

Example

"profiles": {
    "WebApplication1": {
        "commandName": "Project",
        "dotnetRunMessages": true,
        "launchBrowser": true,
        "applicationUrl": "https://localhost:7211;http://localhost:5258",
        "environmentVariables": {
            "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "Development"
        },
        "devTunnelEnabled": true,
        "devTunnelAccess": true
    },
    "IIS Express": {
        "commandName": "IISExpress",
        "launchBrowser": true,
        "environmentVariables": {
            "ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT": "Development"
        }
    }
}

Finally, you can now run the profile changed or the new profile that includes the 2 dev tunnel properties and run the application in a public URL that other people can see.

We need to confirm that we want to use the dev tunnel in the browser

This is the website running using dev tunnels:

You can now share this site with others, every time that you can execute your project Visual Studio will generate a new URL.