Getting “Unable to get the project file from the Web server” while opening a project in Visual Studio

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I recently worked with a customer who was getting “Unable to get the project file from the Web server. Unable to open Web project 'project'. The file path 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\project' does not correspond to the URL 'https://localhost/project'. The two need to map to the same server location" while opening it from Vistual Studio 2003.

While checking found that there is another EXE listening on port 80 on the server. So, our requests from VS to open the website was going to it, hence the error.

While making sure our website is up, we were now getting "Unable to get the project file from the Web server. Visual Studio .NET has detected that the specified Web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1. You will be unable to run ASP.NET Web applications or services".

Resolved this one my making sure there is no proxy selected in IE (or if the proxy is there, add the server name to the exceptions list).

Just thought of doing this quick post so that it may help someone running into the same problem searching for answers in the Internet.