Until recently I have been working on the development on ASP.NET application as the only developer. I have set up a virtual directory in IIS to my development directory. Recently other developers have joined the project and we have therefore started using source safe.

We have used ‘get latest version’ to copy the project onto the other developers PCs to the same directory as on my PC (‘D:\WebApps\…’.). However visual studio insists on creating a real directory under inetpub/wwwroot to store a copy of the application and then using this folder to develop the application.

I have tried creating the virtual directory in iis before copying over the code but visual studio doesn’t want to use it.

Its causing quite a few headaches, does anyone have any ideas? I don’t know if its my lack of understanding of IIS or VSS that’s causing the problem.

:(

When you want to load an existing ASP.Net project in VSS onto a machine where that project has never been on before, here's what you do:

Create the right local directory structure where you want to put the application. Share that folder as a virtual directory with the name matching the project name (do this either thru IIS console or in windows explorer). You'll now have a empty directory.

    [u]** DO NOT GET THE CODE THRU VSS EXPLORER **</u>

Now go into VS.Net. Use File -> Source Control -> Open from source control.. to load the solution and projects onto your local machine. When you get to a project that is a web project, VS.Net will attempt to put it into a virtual directory that matches the name of the asp.net project. It will find the virtual directory you created above and use that. HOWEVER, if it finds a virtual directory with the matching name, but there is already a project file in it, it will create an alternate name (something like MyWebProject_1). This is why you must not use VSS to get the project. Let VS.Net do it.

Something to take note of: You must create the IIS virtual directory before you beginning the process in VS.Net. If you forgot to do it, then you get to the point in VS where it asks you where on the webserver you want to put the project, you can't go to IIS and set it up without completely canceling out of the "Open from Source Control" operation. This is because VS.Net loads the metadata from IIS when it reaches this stage, and it doesn't refresh it. You can make changes to IIS but that dialog box won't see them. You have to start over.

Depending on the complexity of your solutions you'll need to work things out so that the arrangement of projects in the solution doesn't cause problems when multiple people are working in them. There are ways to set them up so that it doesn't matter where any one particular user's dev directory lives on their own machine. As long as the projects of a solution can be referenced thru simple back references (../../anotherproject/anotherproject.vbproj) you'll be ok.

MS has a very good white paper on "Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe" located here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...asp?frame=true

It's long and complicated, but it's thorough and seems to do the trick. A lot of what you do depends on how complex your solutions get. We have solutions that have 10+ projects and many solutions share the same projects. If you set it up right, you'll eliminate redundancy of projects on your local systems and in source control.

I hope this is of some help and not just more confusing for you. It's a complicated task getting a team set up correctly. It took me months to figure it all out. Good luck. Post back when you have more questions. :)

Peter

Cheers Peter, that sorted out all our problems...

A.