trying to do asp.net mvc development from vmware fusion

Question

the issue is that my source is hosted on the host machine (in this case a mac book pro) and visual studio wants to be able to monitor the web.config for changes so it is throwing the error:

An error occurred loading a configuration file: Failed to start monitoring changes to: \path\to\web.config

I have tried to add the HKLM\Software\Asp.Net\FCNMode=1 but it doesn't seem to work. Also, I don't see moving the source to the VHD as a viable option due to version control issues.

Windows 7 64-bit Visual Studio 2008 VMWare Fusion 3.01

Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't see a problem having the working copy of your code on a VM if the code repository is somewhere else.

Answer 2

I'm no filesystem/virtualization expert but I'm guessing that the account that the dev server process is running under does not have permissions to access the configuration file (web.config). The accounts within your VM won't recognized by OS X either so you won't be able to change the permissions to get it to work in this way.

What I would suggest would be to add the IIS component (via Control Panel->Programs->Turn Windows Components on or off) if you haven't already. Then add an application to IIS with the virtual directory within the VHD of your VM. Now to debug, first publish your application to the newly created IIS application (something like http://localhost/MyNewIISApplication) and attach the VS debugger to the IIS worker process w3wp.exe (i.e. Debug->Attach to Process...).