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I have an ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework) that was created in the default location of C:\Users\mcarr\source\repos\ It loads fine from this location. I was asked by my manager to keep projects out on a mapped network drive. So I created the source and repos folders on the mapped drive and copied the entire project to the new location. It won't load from here. I get an error message stating that the creation of the virtual directory https://localhost:XXXXX/ failed. Cannot read configuration file. You will need to manually create this virtual directory in IIS before you can open this project. I have researched with no luck...

Cannot read configuration file due to insufficient permissions

Visual Studio - Cannot Read Configuration File

I did try the suggestion of removing the URL from IISUrl in the project file. Thinking that it may be some other configuration file, I even created another new project in VS2019 and changed the location to the repos directory on the mapped drive from the Configure your new project window of VS2019, and saved the newly created project directly there. Even this new test project, created in place, gives the same error message. Any ideas?

Full environmental disclosure:

VisualStudio 2019 Enterprise with Jetbrains Resharper installed.

64-bit Windows 10 Version 21H2 Build 19044.1826

Open Enterprise Server (OES) network. (Used to be known as Novell) (I suspect this is the root of the problem)

Matthew Carr
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  • Hi Matthew Carr, glad to know you've found the solution to resolve this issue! Please consider accepting it as an answer to change its status to Answered. It will also help others to solve a similar issue. See [can I answer my own question..](https://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer), Just a reminder :) – Housheng-MSFT Aug 03 '22 at 07:10

1 Answers1

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Turns out that OES and Windows don't play well together. I have several mapped drives available for me to store projects on. Some are on OES servers and others are on Windows servers. A help desk guy told me that when copying files from an OES drive to a Windows box he has to put them in C:\temp first, then move them from the temp folder to the desired folder. Windows doesn't trust files from an OES share.

So I moved my project to a mapped drive on a Windows box and the IIS Express error is gone.

I'm a programmer, not a network admin, and this was new to me.

But, problem solved.

Matthew Carr
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  • A few reminders for future readers, 1. Microsoft only tests and supports a small range of storage solutions so not all the ways to store files remotely (including mapped drives creating from those storage options) are trouble free. 2. Mapped drives involve complicated credentials mechanism behind the scene, so you are lucky that only VS/IIS Express combination is used here. Note that IIS does not support any kind of mapped drives, so VS/IIS combination will fail. – Lex Li Aug 04 '22 at 06:34