Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC project: setting the start URL

Question

Consider an ASP.NET MVC 2 project with VS 2010. The goal is to set the 'start URL' on run/debug using VS's built-in Cassini web server.

Entering the URL as I want to be loaded, in the typical & valid format, controller/action, VS 2010 gives this exception.

Tried Remedies:

• starting the URL with and without a slash
• ending the URL with and without a slash

Question: How can you specify the start URL for an MVC 2 project?

Technologies:

• Visual Studio 2010
• ASP.NET MVC 2

Resolution: I was using the wrong field in the startup options. What was needed was the "Specific Page" field with the relative URL, and not Start URL.

Answer 1

Start URL has to be a fully qualified URL and is not really used that often. It's meant for testing web services by opening a page that will call into the service, but isn't part of the application itself.

If you're just looking to start on a certain page of your application, which it sounds like you want, then use the "Specific Page" field, and enter your relative URL.

Here's the doc page on project start options.