This post is to hopefully prevent anyone out there from wasting 5 hours like I did looking for an answer that finally was found buried in a newsgroup.

So I am working on a new project. Details about that to come later. And while doing so we wanted to run this project on the bleeding edge. So I built a new VM with Windows 7. I then installed VS 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 that was just released today. On a side note how happy I was for that. Trying to get MVC 1 not even 2, which wasn't supported for Beta 1, to work was ridiculous. Anyways so after that I wanted to install Velocity because I have read so much about it and if I only used it as a Session State provider that would be good enough. But that is where all the problems began. I tried the install after my initial build of the VM and everything went smoothly. But then I started having some windows installer problems that I really never found an answer to and I had to ultimately rebuild the VM. This is where the problems began.

So I installed all the developer tools I wanted first and then created a snapshot of my VM so in case I had problems again I didn't have to start from scratch again. Finally I wanted to install my last item, Velocity. I began the install as normal with a 64 bit version and everything seemed to be going fine. I then setup the Network Share I was going to use. After that I specified my share and clicked the Test Connection button. Nothing! I pressed again and the install crashed. But not before showing this error that I want to put here word for word so if anyone searches for it they will hopefully find this: "Failed to copy files to the specified network share. Please check network share permissions." A pretty straightforward error but what a time I had figuring this one out. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well I must be completely insane then because I tried that same process 5 maybe 10 times and watched it crash and burn everytime. So now I started looking online for solutions and finding the same thing. Make sure that you specify Everyone with Read/Write permissions on both the share and the folder. Which I did and checked every single time. But still nothing was working. Then finally I stumbled across this article: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/velocity/thread/08e03790-c573-40e3-8aa6-ae0a52a9da83 which says "The installer executes the configuration form as a system user. So in case of workgroup, we need to allow anonymous access to the share." That was it. Though I didn't do that the first time I installed for some reason this time this was all it took. So not just adding Everyone to the share and folder but also adding the Anonymous Logon with read/write on the share and folder. If you add the permissions to the folder before the share it might reflect as contributor but that works as well.

So hopefully this helps you. If anything it will be here for me if I ever run into this again though it's unlikely that I will forget this one. :)