I have recently downloaded VWD Express and following the examples in Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 (excellent book by the way)

Every time I try to run the Admin Tool I get the message "cannot find server" and the browser window will not open. When I click on the icon in the system tray to open browser I get the message

An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again


I have tried reloading the software, but that has not fixed it.
I have also followed the instructions in appendix B of the above mentioned book, including the section on Windows XP Home Edition.

Does anyone have any ideas what I am doing wrong

Since you have XP Home, I am assuming you do not have an actual IIS server installed and using the on in VWD. To open up the Admin Page, try this. It seems to work in my VWD to VS2K5.
While in a webpage project, select Website from the menu and select "ASP.NET Configuration". That should bring up the webadmin for your application.

Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately that does not work. It seems to try to launch, but then, for some inexplicable reason, times out.

Since my last post, I have now been able to run the web site admin tool with a workaround as follows:

I noticed that the url that my browser was trying to open started with

 http://"http://local host ......."

In other words the software seemed to be apending an extra http:// at the beginning of the url and encapsulating the rest of the expression in double quotes.

When I took out the leading http:// and the double quotes the WSAT worked!

I now have some connection errors being reported when I click the secuity tab but that's another problem. At least I got over the first hurdle.

Does anyone know why the business with the url is happening, and also how to stop it? Is there maybe something in machine.config I can alter to correct for this?

Sorry didn't have any text in the previous one... I am having thesame problem as well. Where exactly did you remove the "http://" from..
Thanks