Keeping Visual Studio Projects on a Network Drive

We just did a move from storing all files locally to storing them on a network drive. The problem is that is where my Visual Studio projects are also stored now (no versioning system yet, working on that). I've heard of problems with doing this in the past, but never heard of a work-around. Is there a work around now?

Visual Studio is installed locally. The files are on a network drive. How can I get this to work?

While we do use Source Control, we do also run all our projects from Network Drives (not shared directories, private directories on network drives). The network drives are backed up nightly, and also use Volume Shadow Copy, so if you need to revert to something before it made it's way to SC, then you can.

To get projects to run correctly with the right permission, follow these steps.

Basically, you've just got to map the shared directory to a drive, and then grant permission, based on that Url, to all code. Say you map to "N:\", then use "N:\*" as your Url pattern. It isn't obvious you need to wildcard, but you do.

The question is rather generic so I'll give an answer to one issue I was facing.

I run Visual Studio 2010 using a Parallels virtual machine on my Mac while keeping all my projects on the mac side via a network share. Visual Studio however wouldn't load the projects assembly files from there. Trying to set the rights using "caspol" alone didn't help in my case.

What finally worked for me to allow Visual Studio to load assemblies from a network share was to edit the file "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config" (assuming a default installation).

in the xml "<runtime>" section you have to add

<loadFromRemoteSources enabled="true"/>

You may have to change the permissions on that file to allow write access. Save the file. Restart Visual Studio.