title: Windows Phone 8 Emulator - Access domains from hosts file on host PC?
body: <p>I'm fairly new to Windows Phone development, and I'm trying to accomplish something which I thought would be fairly straightforward to do.</p>
  
  <p>Whenever I develop using ASP.NET, I always create a site in IIS, and create a domain for the development version which I add to my hosts file at point at my local IP (eg: www.mysite.local points to 127.0.0.1). This works fine when developing and testing directly on my machine.</p>
  
  <p>However, I'm currently building an API (using the URL api.mysite.local) that will be consumed by a Windows Phone 8 app - and I'm curious whether there is any way to mimic the same thing using the emulator. I would have expected that the emulator (or Hyper-V which it runs on) might use the Windows hosts file under the hood, but it doesn't seem to. Nor does there appear to be any way to add a host file mapping specifically for it.</p>
  
  <p>Is this not possible? The only way I've been able to accomplish it is by using the IP address. But this means I now have different virtual directories for different apps (eg: <a href="http://xx.xx.xx.xx/api" rel="nofollow">http://xx.xx.xx.xx/api</a>, <a href="http://xx.xx.xx.xx/website" rel="nofollow">http://xx.xx.xx.xx/website</a>, etc) - which I don't really like. I'd ideally like to use the same, full URL.</p>