Tone's Notes

If you’ve ever had trouble adding an existing web application to a solution when the application isn’t under the c:\inetpub\wwwroot folder, adding a webinfo file to the project may help. Typically I have this problem when I use source control to copy my development files to a new machine and need to re-establish proper registration with IIS. It sometimes seems simplest to remove references to projects in a solution that aren’t loading on the new machine and to add them again as existing projects.

The typical error message I get when adding the existing project is:

The project you are trying to open is a Web project. You need to open it by specifying its URL path.

The trick to successfully adding an existing project is to use a file path with a webinfo file instead of an http path, despite what the error message says.

When you create a new web application using Visual Studio .NET 2003 a webinfo file is created automatically for you. This file defines the web path to the application. If the file is missing, or the contents of the file no longer agree with the configuration of your web server, you will have trouble adding the project.

For example, say you have http://localhost/QEs as a virtual directory to “c:\Projects\Quick Experiments” and you have a web application in the folder “c:\Projects\Quick Experiments\WebApp1”.

The project filename is “WebApp1.csproj” and the corresponding webinfo filename is “WebApp1.csproj.webinfo” with the contents:

<VisualStudioUNCWeb>

    <Web URLPath = "http://localhost/QEs/WebApp1.csproj" />

</VisualStudioUNCWeb>

Once you’ve added this file to the project folder, you should have no trouble adding the project to a solution by specifying the file path “c:\Projects\Quick Experiments\WebApp1\WebApp1.csproj”.

For no good reason of which I’m aware, this seems to work far more reliably than trying to add the project with the web path of “http://localhost/QEs/WebApp1/WebApp1.csproj”