One of the unanswered questions from David MacNamee's presentation at the Florida Code Camp as how to set a default port on the Visual Web Developer Web Server, currently know as webdev.webserver. I took a look at the executable itself and discovered the following:
Visual Web Developer Web Server Usage:
WebDec.WebServer /port:<port number> /path:<physical path>[/vpath<virtual path>]
port number:
[Optional] An unsed port number between 1 and 65535.
physical path:
A valid directory name where the Web application is rooted
virtual path:
[Optional] The virtual path or application root in the form of '/<app name>'.
The default is simply '/'.
Example:
WebDev.WebServer /port:8080 /path:""c:\inetpub\wwwroot\myapp"" /vpath:""MyApp""
You can then access the Wb applications using a URL of the form:
http://localhost:8080/MyApp
No this is all fine and dandy if I wanted to maunally start it, but I don't. So I kept on digging and while I didn't see anything in Visual Stuido itself, I did disvoer an entry in the solution file that allows me to set the port.
ProjectSection(WebsiteProperties) = preProject
VWDPort = 8080
EndProjectSection
Using a text editor to change the VWDPort value appears to let me specify my desired starting port which I can then map my web services to for testing.