Simulating an UNC path with a leading dot
- by Uwe Keim
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.