visual studio .net general: Our team is developing two separate Web apps. Up until now, we have
been able to use Microsoft's isolated model and maintain separate
copies on each workstation, under wwwroot. However, the time has come
to migrate the apps to separate servers so that SSL, etc. can be
integrated. Unfortunately, Windows XP Pro does not support multiple
Web sites, so the Web projects must be moved to a Windows Server 2003
box. We found out the hard way that non-isolated mode using FrontPage
Extensions is not an option, since its VSS integration is flaky at
best. We have not been able to get FPSE to go into external source
control mode on our project webs, even after adding the anonymous user
to VSS.

I setup the solution with Web projects at dev.mydomain.com and
devops.mydomain.com. Since the roots are not under wwwroot, I went
through the extra steps of creating file shares dev$ and devops$ as
outlined in MSDN #320265. So far so good; everything loaded correctly
with VSS state intact.

I then closed the solution and attempted to reopen it from source
control. Visual Studio asks for the working copy location of the
projects, and this is where I am stuck. I have been unable to get
Visual Studio to accept a non-default Web site
(jvaught.dev.mydomain.com for example) as a working copy location. I
get the dreaded message "The UNC share does not exist or you do not
have access."

Is it possible to get Visual Studio to use a *working copy* location
that isn't under wwwroot?

Thanks very much,

OK... this is a bit long, but I wanted to write it all out at least
for my sake, so I know what I've tried already.

I fixed the .vspcc files -- they were pointing to localhost/mysite
instead of mysite.mydomain.com. There is no .webinfo file in either
project directory. Do I need to fabricate one?

I cleared my VSWebCache and got latest from SourceSafe to the virtual
directories on the server. Made sure that the sites
mysite1.mydomain.com and mysite2.mydomain.com were setup correctly in
IIS, with host headers, etc. Made sure I could browse to a HTML file
on each site.

I opened VS.NET (2003) on my local box and created a blank solution.
Eventually I would like to have the solution in VSS, since that's what
we have been doing on all our projects. But one step at a time.

At this point I have a choice whether to add the first web project
from source control or via open existing project from web. I will try
open existing from web first. I enter the URL mysite1.mydomain.com.
File browser opens to my documents -- obviously it couldn't find a
file share corresponding to the URL. I type in the URL again into the
file name box and get the dialog "The specified web server could not
be accessed. Please enter a valid URL" etc.

I have created a share named "\\myserver\mysite1$" at the mysite1 root
and blown the permissions wide open. So I type the share name into the
box and am able to browse to the share. I click on the project file.
First I get a dialog saying the project location is not fully trusted
by the .NET runtime, no big surprise there. I click OK. Next dialog
says "The project you are trying to open is a Web project. You need to
open it by specifying its URL path." Which of course takes me back to
square one.

What I think is happening is that Visual Studio can't connect the dots
between http://mysite1.mydomain.com and \\myserver\mysite1$. Is this
where the missing .webinfo file comes in?


Thanks,
-Jonathan Vaught

Senior Applications Developer

Here's an update to my situation.

I wondered if the UNC share names might be critical, so I renamed them
to \\myserver\same_name_as_project_folder. This time when I navigated
to the share in the Open Project From Web dialog, and clicked on the
project file, Visual Studio managed to open the project. I then get a
VSS dialog asking me to pick the source control binding. I navigate to
the VSS database that contains my project, pick the project, and get
the most dreaded "Unspecified error" dialog. The Solution Explorer
window shows no locks next to files. So I go into the Change Source
Control dialog, and I see that the project has attempted to bind to a
nonexistent VSS database on my local machine. I click Unbind and then
Bind to see if I can match up the database manually. I browse to the
VSS database and the project within the database, and click OK. The
server binding shows up as Invalid in the list. I click OK, click
"Continue with these bindings", and get another Unspecified Error.

So I have made some progress, but I'm not there yet. Thanks to anyone
who's listened to these ramblings. I have wasted way too much time on
this, but it's critical to moving forward with our development.

Thanks again,