We use a range of different development environments for our special projects and to make things easier we are now using virtualised environments.  We have learned a few useful lessons so if you want to do web development in a virtualised environment, the following may help with the setup: 

When you create virtual machines from an existing machine there are a number of top level process you must follow to enable successful web development & debugging.

1.       Generate Virtual Machine image and mount the image!

2.       Remove virtual machine from domain

3.       Use the Microsoft utility NEWSID.EXE to allocate a new security ID to the new virtual machine.

4.       Prior to joining domain make sure the network card DNS settings point to the domain controller (Or you will not find the domain)

5.       Join the new machine to the domain

6.       The machine will then have a new SID in active directory and should allow browsing the network resources

7.       If you have problems you should be able to ping the domain. Eg. Ping MYDOMAIN should generate a response from the domain controller.

8.       IIS will be a bit broken because it will still have legacy machine logins for old machine. If you get the following error ‘The process account used to run ASP.NET must have read access to the IIS metabase’ Follow the steps below to add the ASPNET account the the metabase

9.       from a command prompt, iisreset –stop

10.   Goto C:\<windows>\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

11.   aspnet_regiis –ua

12.   Aspnet_regiis –i

13.   aspnet_regiis -ga <NewMachinename>\aspnet

14.   goto   C:\<windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322

15.   aspnet_regiis –i

16.   iirseset –start

17.   Open up Visual Studio 2K5 or above and debug run the website.

18.   He presto you have a working development environment!