Visual Studio Projects on Network Shares

In setting up virtual machines for development, I’ve repeatedly run into trust issues accessing solutions on network shares.  Many blogs advise using the .NET 1.1 Configuration tool, which is no longer shipped with Visual Studio.  You can still get it by installing the old .NET Framework 1.1 SDK first, and then going through a series of installations to bring your machine up to date with the remaining versions and toolsets.  I went through the process once, and it’s very undesirable, especially if you build or rebuild development machines more often than you’d like to admit.

So in my latest round of setups, I came across Robert McLaws’ article on the proper caspol syntax for establishing Full Trust for a specific network share, based on this Microsoft article whose title is overly specific.  I’ll reiterate that command here for your convenience:

Drive:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol.exe -m -ag 1 -url “file:////\\computername\sharename\*” FullTrust -exclusive on

To Robert’s point, who would have thought to include four forward slashes?

Be aware that you’ll get an access error in Vista with UAC on, unless you run with elevated privileges.

I’ve done this on Windows Vista 32bit and it seems to be working great.  Even better, I don’t need to use a VMWare Virtual Disk (which itself has some kind of trust or compatibility issue with Visual Studio, due to being VMFS instead of NTFS), or a Physical Disk, which prevents snapshots unless you first disconnect the disk.  I talked about these VM setup issues in this article.