Windows 2003 and Visual Studio .NET

If you are developing web-applications from a Windows XP box using VIsual Studio .NET and the web server is running Windows 2003 plus your inetpub folder is the not the standard c:\inetpub then you are going to have some problems. Our system administrator setup the IIS web root in a folder other than c:\inetpub let’s say in e:\wwwroot now from my Windows XP box if I try to create a new Visual Studio .NET ASP.NET project against the Windows 2003 server I get the error: “The UNC path … does not exist or you do not have permission to it”. The reason I am getting this error at first I thought was because wwwroot was not shared so I share the folder but I still get the same error message. Then I realized that th share name has to be called: wwwroot$ there has to be a dollar sign after the name. To do shares like this you actually have to go to Computer Management MMC -> Shares and add the share wwwroot$. Once I did that the problem was fixed !

Note simply sharing the wwwroot folder will not solve the problem because sharing it from Windows Explorer would name the share wwwroot. It has to be called: wwwroot$