So I have this development box at home that I use from time to time to try out new concepts.  Several weeks ago I installed Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) on it to play with the latest in Webpart technologies (blog entry for another day).  Well tonight I wanted to tryout this idea that I've been having around distribution groups that are stored in AD/AM and managed by individual users via a website.  So in order to make this work, I needed to develop a new ASP.NET website.  Of course I planned to use Visual Studio.NET 2003 to make this happen, but I ran into something very weird.

As normal, I opened up VS to create a new project.  When I tried to do so, I got the following error:

Unable to create Web project 'TestOne'.  The file path 'c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\TestOne' does not correspond to the URL 'http://magno/TestOne'.  The two need to map to the same server location.  HTTP Error 404:

What would you like to do?

Now at this point, I'm presented with two options:

1. Retry using a different file share path
2. Try to open the project with FrontPage Server Extensions.

Now I think most of us have ran into this problem at some point or another, so I usually try the second option and that put me right in.  But not this time.  After selecting the second option, I get the following error:

Unable to set the permissions on the 'bin' folder to restrict browse access.  Server error:  The method 'mark url-directory executable' is not supported.

A possible cause of this error is insufficient access rights to perform the operation.  You can manually configure the permissions on this folder using Internet Services Manager.

Now I hate to say this, but why is my only options here, "OK" and "Help"?  I really don't think the error is OK, but I have to click it anyways.  Now it seems that VS is doing something, but not sure what.  Then I get another error:

Unable to check out file 'C:\DOCUM~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\rad2D227.tmp'.

Again i have to click an "OK" button.

Now I get a windows asking me to checkout the files (You may not always see this.)  Finally, I see this last error:

The class file '$FILENAME$.cs' specified as the codebehind for 'WebForm1.aspx' could not be loaded.  Make sure that the codebehind attribute in the page or control directive properly references an existing code behind file.

So after all of this, my new ASP.NET website/virtual directory was not setup correctly.  I looking at my site via the Internet Services Manager, but I couldn't even see the site!  Ok, so I deleted the project and tried all over again, but this time I would use the option that used the File Path method.  That wouldn't get me very far, so I tried the first approach again (like it would make a difference), but now I would see a new error saying that there was already a project by that named created!  WHAT?

Now I start digging into WSS to see what's going on.

(OK, let's just get to the point)

Turns out that whenever I was create a new ASP.NET project with VS, it was actually talking to WSS to create the site.  Well WSS, doesn't actually create a new "application"/virtual directory like it did in the past.  It now stores all of the site content and information in the SQL Database that is associated with that instance of WSS.  So in order to make this work I had to do the following:

1. From within the Administrative Tools folder, click on SharePoint Central Administration.
2. In the Virtual Server Configuration section, click on the Configure virtual server settings link
3. Click on the name of the virtual server you want to create sites on.
4. Click on Define managed paths
5. In the Add a New Path section, add the appropriate information.  The ASP.NET project name that I wanted to use was "TestOne", so in the path textbox, I entered "/TestOne".  In the Type section, select the "Excluded path" and then click on "OK".
6. Now go back to Visual Studio.NET 2003 and create your new project using the name you excluded in the step above.

Now I can't guarantee that this will fix your problem, but it sure fixed mine.

Conrad Agramont