Visual Studio 2003 - opening ASP.NET project - getting “The operation timed out” error message

Question

On a Windows 2003 server I installed several versions of Visual Studio, also Visual Studio 2003. On the server I want to develop two different webapplications. One web application is working, but I go problems on the other one.

When I try to open the application (after a rebuild), I get the error: "The Web server reported the following error when attempting to create or open the Web project located at the following URL: 'http://localhost/MyApp'. 'The operation timed out'." I have already seen that the problem disappears when I delete the dll file generated by building. Because the environment will be distributed to multple users, it is not an option to remove the dll everytime to start Visual Studio.

I already tried multiple times to reregister asp.net with aspnet_regiis -u, aspnet_regiis -i and aspnet_regiis -r.

When I execute aspnet_regiis -lv I get the following: 1.1.4322.0 Valid (Root) C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_isapi.dll 2.0.50727.0 Valid C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll

Does anyone knows a solution to this problem? Thanks in advantage.

Answer 1

Did you apply service pack 1 to visual studio 2003?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=69d2219f-ce82-46a5-8aec-072bd4bb955e&displaylang=en

Answer 2

Hi rene I think I have shown you the solution please implement it in your application as well.

Answer 3

This worked for me...

http://forums.asp.net/p/1192304/2066860.aspx

On my XP development machine I went to "C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\VSWebCache\USERNAME\" and deleted the folder matching my VS2003 solution name. (Actually I moved the folder to C:\Temp just in case). This worked, although one designer file would not load without a re-build and the start-up page needed to be re-marked. I don't understand why my solution depends on this VSWebCache (it re-appeared when I re-built my solution.) Can anyone explain this dependence? It's un-settling.

Answer 4

This was still a problem for me after following the steps proposed above. Here's the solution that finally worked for us.

1. Turn on IIS logging on your local machine. Be sure to log the query string and the HTTP response code.
2. Attempt to open your solution and let it time out.
3. Perform an iisreset to flush the IIS logs.
4. Open the IIS logs. You will notice that when you opened your solution you generated quite a bit of activity.
5. VS2003, for whatever reason, attempts to navigate to some of your pages... in particular, it may navigate to your login page if you have forms authentication turned on.
6. Check the processing time and HTTP response code in the log entry for your login page. In our case it was returning a 302 HTTP redirect.

In our code, the login page starts up by checking for a cookie and redirecting to an external page if it isn't found. This redirect is to a location that is not accessible in the dev env. So VS would open the page, follow the redirect, and time out trying to get the page.

We fixed it by modifying the login page with the following code:

//If Request is coming from Visual Studio, just return an error         
if (Request.UserAgent.StartsWith("Microsoft-Visual-Studio.NET"))
{
    Response.StatusCode = 500;
    Response.End();
}

Visual Studio can handle the 500. It can't handle a 302 to an unknown host.

Hope this helps.