Following is a list of tips, trick and recommendations for 
overcoming some of the common annoyances of VisualStudio.net 2003 and 2005. 
I generally use VS.NET for connecting to web projects, so 
most of my tips have to deal with this scenario.


  1. WHAT TO DO IF VISUAL STUDIO 2005 HANGS OR FREEZES DURING STARTUP:
    When connecting to a web project in Visual Studio 2005, it takes quite a while generally to connect to each project. If you have several projects in a solution, you might have to wait 30-60 seconds for each one to prompt you to log in, retrieve files, etc. So, it is tempting to minimize the program and do something else during that time. However, if you minimize Visual Studio before getting the login prompt, the login prompt will never appear. The program will be forced to sit there indefinitely, waiting for you to enter a username and password in a non-existent login box. Well, beleive it or not, the box is there, it's just invisible. The problem is that even if you maximize VS 2005, the box will not reappear. The trick is that you must use alt-tab to tab to the login box in your task list. It doesn't have a spot on the taskbar, or in the task manager, but it is in the alt-tab selection list. So alt-tab to the generic window icon, release, and viola, there is your login box. This is much better than having to sit there for several minutes waiting for the prompts, or having to force the program to quit since after it's been hanging there and you can't log in.
  2. HOW TO AVOID USERNAME AND PASSWORD PROMPT FOR EVERY WEB PROJECT IN YOUR SOLUTION:
    One thing I found very annoying is that i would get prompted for the same UN/PW 17 times evey time I opened my solution (which has web 17 projects in it). The reason for this, according to this MSDN Page, is that my user did not have administrator role in the front page server extensions for the project(s) in question. I found this extremely odd, considering that I am an member of the DOMAIN\Developers group, which has the Administrator Role on each of my projects. I tried a number of tweaks to my users and groups at the domain level, but nothing I did worked. Anyways, the only way for me to get access to my projects without logging in every time, was to create a new user on the LOCAL WEB SERVER that contained my projects. However, I did not create this user via the Front Page Administration as directed by the link above. Rather, I created the user as I normally would on the server (via Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Users & Groups). So I added my user (ryan) as a local account on the web server, with the same Username and Password as I use on my work station. I added this new local web server account a member of the LOCAL Administrators group on the web server, and now VIOLA! No more getting prompted 17 times!

  3. HOW TO AVOID THE "THIS PROJECT IS NOT ON A TRUSTED WEB SERVER" MESSAGE:
    If you get a warning every time you access a project which states that the project is not on a trusted domain (or something of that nature) all you have to do is go to your Internet Security Trust settings (via Start > Settings > Control Panel > Internet Options > Security > Trusted Sites), and add the domain name of the project you are working on, as a trusted site. Note that if you have several host names with different projects on the same domain, you can add the trust as *.domain.com and all host names at that domain will be considered "trusted". You will then no longer get this annoying message.

  4. HOW TO ENSURE YOU GET LINE NUMBERS IN YOUR STACK TRACE ON EXCEPTIONS:
    I kept encountering a problem where suddenly my stack trace didn't show line numbers. Toget the line numbers back, you must first ensure that your project is set to Debug (not Release) in the configuration manager. Then, delete the {projectname}.dll and {projectname}.pdb files in the bin folder. Then do a build on the project to regenerate these two files and your line numbers should return on subsequent exceptions that are thrown.

  5. ENSURE LOCAL ASPNET ACCOUNT HAS MODIFY PERMISSIONS:
    I ran into a lot of problems when first setting up my projects because the ASPNET account did not have modify permissions on my project folders. Be sure to give the ASPNET account Read,WRite and Modify on the Folder containing your app to ensure file IO operations such as uploading images and writing text files succeeds.

  6. FIXING VISUAL STUDIO AFTER REINSTALLING IIS OR .NET FRAMEWORK
    I encountered this error: "Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1. You will be unable to run ASP.NET Web applications or services." when attempting to run Visual Studio for the first time after re-installing the .NET Framework on my machine. The problem has to do with the IIS mappings of file types in .net. Anyways, this MSDN Knowledge Base Article (#306005) explained the problem and gave an excellent solution.