Simulating an UNC path with a leading dot

Posted by Uwe Keim on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Uwe Keim
Published on 2011-06-21T15:50:28Z Indexed on 2011/06/21 16:24 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 336

Filed under:

Windows

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network-shares

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parallels

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hostname

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unc

Being a C# .NET Windows Forms developer, some customers are running our applications on an Apple OS X Mac inside a Parallels virtual machine.

Parallels presents host folders to the guest Windows as UNC paths with a leading dot like

\\.psf\Home\Some\More\Folders

Now an application of us cannot handle the leading dot correctly when accessing files from these kind of shares ("Invalid URI, cannot analyze host name" exception).

I want to debug and fix this issue, unfortunately I do have no Mac and Parallels around here to test it.

My question is:

Is there a way to "simulate" this kind of share on a normal Windows server or client so that I'll be able to debug my application with Visual Studio?

What I tried so far:

I already tried to edit my HOSTS file to contain an entry like

# ...
127.0.0.1       .psf
# ...

but Windows just seems to not recognize the share at all.

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