Dev-Picayune

At work we were having a serious problem getting another developer setup to work on a complex VS.NET solution we have that has Windows client projects, server-side web components and ASP.NET projects as sub-sections of the solution (among a few other things).

The problem we were having was the web type things would not properly work coming from Source Safe. We’d download the latest to his laptop (using the correct working directory (c:\inetput\wwwroot\websubprojectname) and then turn that folder into a virtual directory. Everytime you’d open the solution it would report “Error: could not open project file”. We tried everything, security, copying files from a working installation, enabling front-page extensions, Uninstalling and reinstalling the ASP.NET IIS registration. After beating our heads against the wall for many hours, Tim (my brilliant co-worker), realized that if you deleted everything off the local machine, went into VS.NET and created a new web project with the exact same name (and thus putting it in the same directory), and then deleting that new one and then regetting and redoing all the virtual directory stuff as previously described it would suddenly work. Apparently there is some sort of configuration cache or meta-deta being stored somewhere that gets cleared when you create an unrelated project with the same name and then delete it. Bizarre!