My day job requires me to use both Perl and C#. My prefered development environment is on my Macbook. When hacking Perl, I use TextMate, but for my C# work, I need to use Visual Studio. Luckily, VMWare Fusion lets me run the dreaded Micro$oft IDE when I need it. Since our source code is all in a Subversion repository, and since I already checked out my code on the Mac, I thought why not just open and edit my Visual Studio solutions off of the shared network folder that Fusion creates? That way, I can run Visual Studio in Unity mode and use the command-line Subversion tools in Terminal.app. However, this has not worked out as I had hoped.
Creating a mapped drive letter to my networked volume is easy. I have read/write access to the files on my Mac via this networked volume. But, I encounter two problems.
First, when trying to open a Solution file within Vistual Studio 2005 that is stored on a network volume, it will give me this error about the project location being untrusted:
Now, this error is easily banished with a simple caspol invocation
on the command line:
caspol -m -ag 1.2 -url urlname FullTrust
Just replace “urlname” with the full UNC path as in
“\\\\Some\\Path\\*” and remember to include the “*” at the end.
The real problem I am having is when I try to run a project. It compiles
just fine, the ASP.NET Development Server starts up, and my Web browser
opens up trying to load the .aspx page. But, I always get a server
error message that says “failed to start monitoring changes…” like
this:
If I use TortiseSVN to check-out the files directly onto the virtual hard drive, everything works without incident. I’d really prefer to avoid duplicating files on the virtual hard drive, if I can help it. Does anyone out there in Blogging Land have a solution to this issue or even know exactly what is causing it?
12 Comments
did you ever find the solution?
No, I didn’t find a solution. I just installed VS2008, so I’ll see if the error persists there. But, it might be related to the OS (WinXP) or the version of IIS running or something else. I’ll post an update after I try it again with VS2008.
Just had the same issue occur in Visual Studio 2008 on Fusion 2.0 beta … will post a solution if i find it
Try right click on the page and say “View Source” (believe it or not!) … there was an exception thrown unexpectedly from the ASMX code that displayed in a commented out block in the page source!
Good luck.
Since it’s the ASP.net user that is trying to get access to your vmware shared folder, It’s the vmware machine that would need to be fixed. Since the UI does not provide advanced setup the simple solution is to reverse the share.
Sharing a folder from your windows machine then accessing it with SMB from your mac got things working for me.
Yep I am experiencing the same problem with VS 2008 on Windows XP and VMWare Fusion. Pulling my hair out on this one.
@Johnny – didn’t know you could do that so will look into that.
I’ve had the same frustration, and here’s what I did. Rather than using VM Fusion shared folders, I shared out my project folder from my mac using SMB. In my Windows VM, I then mapped a network drive to this folder, and set it as a trusted location. That way, my VM contains no project files whatsoever; my mac has everything. And the Visual Studio Development Server seems to be fine with that setup.
It seems to be specifically Shared Folders (i.e. the hgfs) that causes the problem. When using Performance Monitor, I noticed a “Fast IO Disallowed” message kept popping up every time the webdev process tried to access /Device/hgfs/.host/etc….. So maybe whatever protocol is being used by shared folders doesn’t allow Fast IO access?
Anyone have any ideas about this?
I had the same problem because i choosed a mac shared folder as my documents root. The explanation is the following: You need to have (and be able to control) the permissions over some files (like web.config). That’s not possible if you’re using a network mapped unit (like vmware’s shared folders). What I’m doing is having a copy of webprojects inside the Virtual Machine filesystem and using a sync tool (like rsync) to make backups inside the mac file system.
If any of you are still having problems with the “Failed to start monitoring changes” warning on folders shared between Mac and your windows VM, this totally fixed the problem for me: http://alextafoya.com/post/2009/08/19/Make-Visual-Studio-work-with-VMWare-Fusion-shares.aspx
And I looked for a lonnnggggggggg time.
I just ran into this same issue using VMWare Fusion 3.0, Windows 7, and Visual Studio 2008. To Murray’s point above, I think this article I accidentally found answers that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810886. Unfortunately it wouldn’t help me as the registry structure is different in Windows 7. I’m going to try Murray’s solution as I don’t want the extra overhead of syncing files.
This was indeed a very frustrating problem. I’m running vm fusion 3.0 and windows seven. After two days of fighting with this issue, I came upon this page. After reading the all the post, i releaized that the solution was was simple. Open visual studio (2010 RC in my case) select tool | options Next select the Projects and Solutions > General I then changed all the paths to point to the local drive e.g. Projects Location -> C:\Users\MICHAEL\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects Project Templates -> C:\Users\MICHAEL MONTGOMERY\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates etc.
Noweverything works perfectly…
If you have skimmed down this far go back and check post number 9 by Dave Yankowiak | December 21, 2009 at 3:43 pm
If you follow all the steps it fixes the VMWare Fusion problem on Mac with Visual Studio 2008.
Although, beware it slows down the loading of your web projects a lot. However, to me the performance hit is worth the other benefits.
Good find Dave Y. thanks!
And a specail thanks to who m ever posted the fix on Alextafoya.com (you are a wizard!)
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