This is the third report I've seen for this bug.  Is the exact text of the error message is "Visual Web developer does not support creating web sites on a Sharepoint Web Server"?  Does it mention a version number?

I'm working with a developer to find a possible cause for this bug.  We search the metabase for certain strings to make sure we aren't opening SharePoint 2.0 or higher, so maybe another string is in your metabase that is giving a false positive. 

After further investigation I found out that VWD checks the version of "owssvr.dll" to determine whether or not to display the error.  This is a dll that should only be installed by SharePoint.  A few questions:

1. Do you have SharePoint installed?  If so you will have to create a new virtual directory using SharePoint and exclude it from SharePoint control
2. If you don't have SharePoint installed, can you check your machine for owssvr.dll?  If it is on the machine, can you tell me the path to the dll, and the version? 
3. What OS are you running VS 2005 on?

Thanks for any feedback.

The exact message is:

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Unable to create the Web 'http://mymachine/testweb'.  Visual Web Developer does not support creating Web sites on a SharePoint Web server.  See Help for more details.
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I have no idea where the Help is, nothing in VS help.

I don't know how this whole problem started.  But I know that I couldn't open my websites in my local iis with frontpage anymore for some reason.  I downloaded the latest FP Server Extensions on MS's site (5.0.2.4803).  This may be the cause of now not being able to create new web sites using HTTP in VS2005.  Not sure.

I am also having the same exact problem on my laptop!  So, there is definitely something going on with FPSE's and VS2005. 

Maybe you could try on a test machine to configure it so you could open up websites in FP2003 from the local IIS install (ie http://mymachine/).  I've always been able to do that and then open up the FP site I wanted after that.   Then see if you can also get VS2005 to create new web sites via HTTP. 

I know that I was able to create sites in VS2005 at one point via HTTP.  I really thing the FP2003 problem and then installing the latest FPSE's may be where the problem is.

Thanks

I have never installed SharePoint.  I don't even think you can on Windows XP Pro, but I could be wrong about that.

But I really think that installing FPSE's 2002 probably installs a subset of Sharepoint.

I just learned this:

If I uninstall in IIS the Server Extensions 2002, I can then create web sites using HTTP in VS2005.  So it seems that VS2005 doesn't actually use FPSE's to create the web sites.  Okay, this is great I thought, but now I can't use FP2003 to  create or open web sites.  When I try to open a site now in FP2003, I get this message "The Web Server at 'http:/myMachine' does not appear to have Windows SharePoint Services installed". 

This is what leads me to believe that FPSE2002 are related to Windows Sharepoint Services.

So, I ran a search at this point for the file you asked about "owssvr.dll".  It wasn't on my machine.

I'm going to now reinstall FPSE2002 and see if I can no longer create sites with VS2005.  I get back to on that when I am done.

Yep, just as I suspected.

I reinstalled the FPS's 2002 and then I can open up sites with FP2003, but I can no longer get VS2005 to create sites via HTTP.

Also, after installing FPSE2002, i searched for and found "owssvr.dll" on my machine.

So, it looks like VS2005 doesn't like the latest update of the Frontpage Server Extensions that are posted on Microsoft's site.

The reason I need both FP2003 and VS2005 is that I have sites  made in both FP & VS and also clients sites made in FP2003 and VS2003(so far).  So the ability of the 2 apps to live together nicely on 1 machine is critical for me.

Thanks

OK, this is definitely a bug in VWD.  I spent a few hours testing this and here are a couple of work-arounds.  It seems that only Localhost webs are affected after installing the web download for FPSE 2002.  The bug won't repro on a default install of Windows 2003 Server, even though it has FPSE 2002.  The reason is that the web download includes a file we think is part of a SharePoint server (owssvr.dll).  I don't know what effect renaming or removing this file from the machine will have, so I will suggest the following.

• For Open Web Site use the "Remote Site" tab, and type in the server name instead of localhost, like "http://servername/webname"
• For New Web Site click on the 'Browse' button, select "Remote Site" tab, type in location name of web with server name "http://servername/webname", click Open to return to New Web Site dialog, click OK, and a new web site is created.

I hope these suggestions help.  We are working on a fix.

I have this error on a WinXP SP2 machine where I first installed Visual Studio 2005 and then Visual Web Developer: everything worked great for a while, but when I decided to remove VWD this problem appeared (not sure why).

Following your discussions I found that owssrv.dll (located in "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\50\isapi") is loaded by owstimer.exe, which is "SharePoint Timer Service"; I'm mot sure what it's meant do to, or what I have it on my laptop, I use it as a test machine and I can't tell exactely what (when) it's been installed.

I stopped "SharePoint Timer Service" and put it on manual startup, then renamed owssrv.dll to owssrv.dll.old (just in case I need to restore the previous configuration for some reasons) and now I'm able to create new HTTP based web applications on my localhost with Visual Studio 2005, and everything else seem to work fine...

Hope this helps, I'll update this post in case I'll find any issue with the above.

Cheers
Carlo

Thanks for this fix. I have this problem on several systems and hope MSFT corrects the bug. It has been affecting quite a few folks I know. I was beta testing VS2005 and assumed the problem would go away with the release, but it didn't.

Tom Skinner [C# MVP]

I had this problem;  I found the owssvr.dll in

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\50\isapi

 I renamed it to remove_owssvr.dll and the problem went away ....