How do I make Visual Studio play happily with shared folders in VMware

Question

My dev boxes tend to get a little cluttered - I try a lot of libraries and new apps, also need to test with different versions of visual studio. I end up doing everything with VM's.

I want to keep all the code on the real computer, accessed through a vmware host shared folder - so I can swap and change vms. Also, I find the way the file system works, all the generated temp files force the vm disk to be quite bloated, so I want to move %temp% there as well.

When I try this -

• code works, but anything I open/run keeps giving me warnings about network shares and trust - very annoying
• if I move the temp directory, everything windows seems to work fine, but visual studio fails to build - can't seem to write to temp - even though resharper and other things are doing so at the same time

I managed to sort of deal with the temp files by creating a ramdisk within the VM - and that works, but it loses me a gb of memory.

So - somehow, either at the windows or visual studio level, I really want to say "trust the shared folder completely and treat it like another disk in every way". Anyone know a way of doing that?

Answer 1

I know this is old but I came across it looking for a solution to develop in a VM (that is in Host Only mode) but keep the SVN repo directory on a shared directory. I think the following URLs may help:

• http://lostechies.com/scottreynolds/2009/03/31/vmware-fusion-shared-folders-and-visual-studio-development/
• http://blogs.endjin.com/2013/06/visual-studio-xcode-and-vmware-fusion-shared-folders/