Today I was greeted by the following dialog box:

I immediately thought, "Hmm, that's strange. Why is my C:\ drive not trusted all of a sudden? It's works fine for all my other existing projects. What's special about this new one?"

I had the answer, but I didn't realize it at the time. After reading Scott Hanselman's Sharpen the Saw for Developers article, I had wanted to check out the source code for DotNetKicks. So I had downloaded the source code, and extracted it to my C:\Projects\ folder.

I started to search for more information about this "The project location is not trusted" error message I was getting, and I found out the following:

First, I found this on MSDN

The Project Location is Not Trusted Dialog Box

This dialog box appears if you attempt to open or create a client project on a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path. By default, a UNC path is not a trusted location for a project. Your project might not run correctly when you attempt to debug or run from this location.

 That is definitely the dialog box I was getting. Now I was concerned. One thing I am sure of, is that if my computer thinks my C:\ driver is an untrusted UNC path, I was going to be in a world of hurt, if I didn't find and fix the fundamental issue.

This information also concerned me because I was using a Virtual PC to try and open this project with. And I started to wondering if this was somehow playing a part in the issue.

Next, I found the same issue on Dave's Tech Shop

Dave didn't have the answer to my problem, but he did discuss how to give FullTrust permission to a UNC path.

Finally, I discovered Stephen Cawood's Geek Literature blog, and his article .Net project location is not trusted.

Stephen explains that there is a new security feature that applies to downloaded zip files. What I learned completely surprised me, since I've downloaded countless projects before and had never seen nor heard of this before.

Here's what I had to do to unblock the project I had extracted from a zip I had downloaded off the Internet.

 

Right-click the Zip file, choose Properties, click Unblock, click Apply and then unzip.