Running Visual Studio ASP.NET project on a Mac with Parallels 6

Question

I use Mac as my primary OS, but I often work on ASP.NET MVC projects. I want to use the same file system for them, and not virtual OS image.

The reason for that is because I want to integrate the projects with Mac OS (i.e. upload them to the server via Transmit, a Mac OS FTP app).

But the problem here is that ASP.NET can't really work with projects located on network drives. So when I try to run a site (either with VS 2010's built in web server or with IIS 7), I get

Error Summary HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

And this is a common mistake but no solution that I could find worked for me.

If I create a project on Parallel's virtual C:\ drive, everything works fine.

P.S. I hear that VMWare has better network drives support, but is it as smooth as Parallels? Parallels 6 runs extremely fast for me, and my Mac Mini doesn't even get warm with VS 2010 and several other Mac apps open.

P.P.S. I also heard about using DropBox and/or Windows Live Mesh. Is clouding a good idea in this case?

Thank you

Answer 1

You're creating an awful lot of pain for yourself if you want to do all this this just because you want to use a Mac FTP client to deploy your sites/applications.

Visual Studio 2010 contains Publishing tools which make deployment much easier (and are smarter) than just ftp. I suggest you have a play with them and then see if you still want to go down this dark, bumpy and dangerous path :-)