How to simulate a Host file for the time of one request

Question

I need to access simultaniously multiple instances of a web services with the following Url. The web services is hosted in IIS and has SSL enabled.

https://services.mysite.com/data/data.asmx

Usually, when we do this process manually, we go one by one and update the Windows host file (c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) like this :

192.1.1.100 services.mysite.com

I would like to automate the process and do it with some multithreading. So I cannot change the Host file. Is there a way to simulate a host file when we do a HTTP request in C#?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you get the same effect by setting the proxy server of that specific request to the IP address of the actual Web server you want to send the request to.

Answer 2

You can change the URL that your request is hitting at runtime, something like this:

svc.Url = "http://firstServer.com";

So if you create a program that loops through each of your desired servers, just update the URL property directly (that example is taken from WSE 3 based web services).

Answer 3

If you know the IP address of the server's SSL endpoint (which isn't necessarily the same as the server's default IP address), then you could just aim you web-service at that? Obviously the SSL check will fail, but you can disable that through code...

ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback += delegate
{
    return true; // you might want to check some of the certificate detials...
};