Sometimes, you want to see what is going on when your nice shiny new App is supposed to connect to your awesome API and get some data from it/to it. Unfortunately – your App will (mostly) not connect to your API when it’s running on localhost. Android provides a nice little get around by using the DNS 10.0.2.2 – but this isn’t much use from an iOS device. And I find I really prefer to test from my development phones, rather than an emulator.

Recently I came across an amazing tool to help me out with this – ngrok. This creates an externally accessible URL poiting to your localhost. Even better – there is a Visual Studio extension that will start a tunnel for each application within your solution.