You may receive a "Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web server is not running" error message when you try to create a project or open a previously created project

When you try to create a project or open a previously created project, you may receive the following error message:

When you create or open a project in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio .NET 2003 makes an HTTP Web request to determine the version of the .NET Framework that is on the Web server. Visual Studio .NET 2003 calls the http://servername/get_aspx_ver.aspx page. If you receive the error message, the default Web site is using Forms authentication, and the request is redirected to an .htm page. Therefore, the request for the .aspx page is never made, and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) cannot return the version information.

To resolve this problem, use the location tag to stop Forms authentication from redirecting the request. To do this, add the following code to the Web.config file:

<location path="get_aspx_ver.aspx" />

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a bug in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.