Recently, a co-worker of mine encountered an interesting problem using Visual Studio ASP.Net built-in web server. He solved the problem and shared his solution. I asked him if he minded my placing the solution on this site and he said that it was OK to share…
I have Visual Studio setup in a VM guest, but I want to keep most of my projects and other data on my host drive, as I need to access from the host and other VM guests. So I can create this setup with:
C:\>mklink /d C:\DEV "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\DEV" symbolic link created for C:\DEV <<===>> \\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\DEV C:\>mklink /d C:\UTIL "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\UTIL" symbolic link created for C:\UTIL <<===>> \\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\UTIL C:\>dir Directory of C:\ 08/09/2010 11:38 AM <SYMLINKD> DEV [\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\DEV] 08/05/2010 02:32 PM <DIR> Logfiles 07/13/2009 11:20 PM <DIR> PerfLogs 07/28/2010 08:01 PM <DIR> Program Files 07/20/2010 10:11 AM <DIR> Program Files (x86) 07/19/2010 07:29 PM <DIR> TEMP 08/04/2010 03:33 PM <DIR> Users 08/09/2010 10:57 AM <SYMLINKD> UTIL [\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\CDRIVE$\UTIL] 07/23/2010 12:11 PM <DIR> Windows
Worked OK for a normal project, but ASP.NET projects would complain with the error:
Failed to start monitoring changes to 'C:\DEV\Projects\<project>
Turns out this is due to the feature of ASP.Net that monitors web.config for changes, so it can reload the application when web.config is updated. Since this is a development environment, I don’t need that feature, so that can be disabled with the following registry value:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ASP.NET] "FCNMode"=dword:00000001
More information can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911272