Unable to launch visual studio's localhost web server

I am not new to Microsoft’s development products and I have been using Visual studio for some time now. While developing a new web application project recently, I was shocked to see a pop up screen: “Unable to launch Visual Studio’s localhost Web server on port XXXX”.

I did some googling and found sites with useful information on how to get my development site up and running. There were many suggestions:

• ·         Restart my computer
• ·         Restarting Visual Studio
• ·         Changing the port number etc.

Some even suggested I telnet, but then I thought telnet is not my thing. In all the suggestion I found on the net, only 1 worked. And it was actually very simple. The anti-virus on my machine was Node32. What the anti-virus was doing was setting visual studio as a web browser. The solution was very simple. Go to the Setup of ESET Nod32. Under the advanced program setting expand the web browsers tree. You will see a display like the one shown below:

Uncheck visual studio and you are good to go.