I have a Visual Studio "solution" which contains a Web application project (among a few other projects). Visual studio "typical" setup seems to be to insist that the output directory for binaries is smack in the root of the project source directory. In particular, each time the web application project is opened, Visual Studio will reset the physical path of the IIS virtual directory to point to the project directory.
This is problematic on many levels:
It's never wise to mix binary output directories and source trees
If the web application is buried deep within a directory hierarchy of other source, wherein many projects produce libraries which may be used as support libraries in the web application, then all the other supporting projects must have their binary output directories set to a bin directory a some non-obvious, nonsensical location somewhere in the source tree.
This "typical" VS setup does not have your web app setup duplicate the "production" setup you would get from a publish: there may be files in your source tree (an old .js file there there from a repository extraction, for example) that are not referenced in your projects, and so would not be in the production published package, but are there in your debugging setup.
It is very possible and very easy to configure all the projects in a Visual Studio solution to build to a bin directory in some subdirectory cleanly placed outside the source tree. It is also easy to ensure that the web app build places all content cleanly in this directory. It is also easy to configure an IIS virtual directory to point to this build output directory. And then Visual Studio, unannounced and unbidden, screws this up by arbitrarily changing the physical directory of the carefully configured virtual IIS app, to point to the middle of one's source tree.
How can this crazy-making behaviour be stopped? I.e. how do I prevent Visual Studio from automagically re-setting the physical path of the virtual web directory each time the web app project is opened?
This question has been asked many times here on Stack Overflow, but I have seen no real answers:
The response to this question (IIS8.5 is automatically changing Physical Path property) simply indicates how to control the order in which Visual Studio does its repointing.
This question and response (Visual Studio creating IIS virtual directories when solution opened) simply confirm the behaviour.
The response to this question (Opening projects changes iis settings) is simply wrong, as are some of the comments.
These questions (Visual Studio 2012 changes IIS application directory without asking), (Visual Studio changes local IIS configuration) have no responses.
Basically, no one has said it can't be done, but no one has give a decent solution either.
I have my application in IIS pointed at %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\web, and would like it to stay that way. Like others, I discovered that every time I opened the solution in Visual Studio (I'm using 2017), it would change the application's path in IIS to point to the path that Visual Studio uses.
I've made the following change to the project settings (web tab) for my project. In the servers section, I've set the drop-down to "External Host", and then entered the project URL as https://localhost/web. I'm now able to open the solution in VS without it updating the path in IIS.
Related
How do I create a Visual Studio Project for Development on my Local PC that links to Existing files and folders on a Server?
My employer has a large website. Most of that girth (close to 100 GB) is contributed to Portable and Image document (i.e. PDF and JPEG) files, but there are also numerous web files (.html, .aspx, .php, etc).
We have the following folders:
a WORKING folder that contains everything that is "Live" on our web server.
a BETA folder that contains newest technologies that are being tested and tried.
a DEVELOPMENT folder that contains numerous copies of projects that are being worked on by the different developers.
Developers are allowed to use whatever tools they prefer, so we have people who develop using Notepad++, Dreamweaver, Komodo, Zend Studio, and (now) Visual Studio.
It is NOT OK for me to create Visual Studio Projects for myself on the network servers. Other developers using other tools are not creating solution files or \bin and \obj folders on the servers, and I certainly should not be either.
So, to work on a file in Visual Studio, I use Windows Explorer to browse to the location, then I open it in the IDE.
However, this causes me to lose a lot of the power of Visual Studio - particularly if other classes used in this file, because I would have no access to the Intellisense for that class and I cannot simply Right-Click and go to definition.
Also, since each development environment is so large, I can not copy them to my laptop with its high tech 125 GB Solid State Drive (should be interesting to read that in a couple of years).
What I would like to do is create the Visual Studio Projects on my local drive, and then have them reference the files and folders on our network.
I've looked and found these similar questions, but my goal is slightly different:
Working efficiently on remote projects in Visual Studio
How do I add an existing directory tree to a project in Visual Studio?
How to "Add Existing Item" an entire directory structure in Visual Studio?
These are all great topics, but none of them show a way to create a local project that uses remote files.
It would seem that developers in large company teams would have already developed a way to do this, and that I just do not know what it is called.
I have found a way to do this!
For a long time, I was working with 2 sets of folders. One for our repository and one for Visual Studio.
I'd make changes in Visual Studio, then copy those working files over to the repository folder.
That was time consuming! Very.
Here is how I found to fix it: Open the Visual Studio Project file (*.csproj, *.vbproj, or *.phpproj) in NOTEPAD with Visual Studio closed.
Locate the <ItemGroup> tab, and change every path to be from the one shown to one that uses a relative path to get to the actual files.
Notepad's Replace... CTRL+H will save you hours here!
It makes a funky looking project environment, but it works!
If this helps anyone else or if it were even something you didn't know you could do to manipulate Visual Studio, kindly vote it up.
I have an issue. We are upgrading to VS 2012 at work. When we open a VS 2010 project Visual Studio converts the project. This is fine, because VS 2010 can still use the project (yay microsoft). However, there is a \Backup folder created in the solution directory. Is this being created as part of the migration? Is there any way to control it?
The reason I ask is that the process that makes this folder copies web.config files into the folder. If you then try to build the solution (these are MVC projects), we get a "It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS." error. The cause is that there is a web.config file in a subfolder instead of the root folder. We did not make and do not want this change, and cannot figure out how to control it. Deleting the Backup\Web.config file fixes the error. Renaming it from web.config to web.config.bak fixes the problem.
I don't really want to have to personally open and convert every single project, and don't want random people bumping into this problem. Any idea how to either stop VS from creating the Backup folder, or how to make it create them in the my documents studio folder etc? I can't find any setting to control this and can't find any good info.
By chance, are you using the MvcBuildViews property to pre-compile your views at build time? If so, this is why you're encountering this (since it does the pre-compile in the same directory, it doesn't filter out any of the files below the project directory).
Note that you will also encounter this issue if you use the Publish feature for this project. Publish copies the web.config under your intermediate build output directory (by default, obj/) before and after applying web.config transforms.
The good news is that in VS2012, or in VS2010 with the latest Azure SDK installed, pre-compile is now supported for Web Application Projects (including MVC). These settings are currently in the project properties, under the Package/Publish Web tab.
(this doesn't directly address your question about the Backup folder, but it was too long for a comment.)
There is no way to control it that I found. We had to go ahead and run through and convert every project to 2012 and delete the backup folders to prevent any other team from running into it.
My development machine was recently upgraded from XP/VS 2008 to Windows 7/VS 2010. I have a Web Site project that I need to continue to run as a Web Site (as opposed to Web Application Project) in 2010. Ideally I'd like the solution files to be in the web root of my system (C:\Webs), but if they're in My Documents, that's fine.
The important part is that I have a folder (called Data, off C:\Webs) that contains roughly 20 GB of .rft and .pdf files, etc., which needs to be on the web root, so the application can access those files, but NOT be part of the build process.
I tried setting up a new blank web site, with the solution in My Documents, but the problem is that when I dragged and dropped the folders from my webs directory (where I need to be running from) into the Solution Explorer window, the actual files were duplicated and copied into the My Documents folder, rather than a "pointer" to the files.
Can someone please tell me how to set up a new Web Site-style project in VS 2010 and include the files from my Webs folder, while allowing me to exclude my Data folder from the overall project, but have the files in it be accessible by the code?
Thanks!
Mike
I am currently working on a solution which has an ASP.NET application and a Web Service. Whenever I open this solution I get the message that the virtual directories for this project have not yet been created and must be to continue. The problem is, if I hit OK, it cannot create the directories because they already exist and then I cannot load the project. Looking in IIS I can see that the virtual directory exists in C:/Inetpub/wwwroot/ProjName. If I delete this from IIS, I can then open the project, but it creates the virtual directory in C:/location of project folder. When it uses the project's location, I am not able to connect to the site or the web service.
The same thing happens on XP with IIS 5.1, VS 2010 and Server 2003 with IIS 6.0, VS 2010. Similarly, it happens on colleague's machines, so I am convinced that it is a setting in VS, and not IIS or my machine.
Right now, my solution is to delete the virtual directories, open the VS solution, delete the virtual directories, and publish the projects with the publish toolbar in visual studio (not the web tab in project properties).
I fear that I've at some point messed up a setting on both of the projects, but it has been some time since I've been working around this. I've scoured all of the settings and I can't find anything that fixes this behaviour. I need to pass the project along to someone else, and I feel as if the work around instructions may be confusing so I want to fix this.
I used to do things similarly back in the days when VS didn't have its own dev server - re: directly work on web projects in a local version of IIS (if memory serves, this was called "Personal Web Server" or PWS - am I advertising my age?)
Anyway, I haven't (thankfully) done that since VS (2005?) got its own dev server...
Try this process in VS 2010:
You can develop your solution on any local folder in your file system. You can run/debug your solution from VS (ctrl f5 or f5 respectively) - it will use VS dev server by default. Your development machine doesn't even need to have IIS...
After you are done developing and debugging (using VS and its dev server), you can publish to IIS or even to some other "publish folder" in your (local) file system, and simply copy the files to whatever (local/remote) IIS virtual (ASP.NET application) folder you prefer.
I hope I can explain this question sufficiently...
In the past, we have utilized a web.Config file in the wwwroot folder so multiple sites can pick up the same connectionstrings/app settings (it also allows us to have different connectionstrings on different servers, so we could publish the project without having to make changes to its web.config every time).
I'm trying to do that with Visual Studio 2010. I have a Web Project, and under Properties - Web tab, I have "Use Visual Studio Development Server" and a Virtual Path. Since it's not running under IIS, it won't pick up a config file stored in c:\inetpub\wwwroot (makes sense). Is there a way to get it to pick up such a file in this situation?