I have a SharePoint 2013 development environment I am using for multiple site collection in my web farm. Each site collection is associated with a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). I am developing a separate custom farm solution for each of these site collections and want to be able to debug against each of these site collections.
When I create my SharePoint 2013 project in Visual Studio, it asks me to specify the SharePoint site to connect to and typically defaults to the name of the web server. When I enter the actual FQDN, i.e. dev1.catapultsystems.com, I get the following error message:
Cannot connect to the targeted site
Even though the SharePoint site collection is hosted on the local system, because I am using a Fully Qualified Domain Name of dev1.catapultsystems.com, it is fooled into thinking that I am attempting remote development, which is only supported for Apps for SharePoint 2013.
This is a known bug that should be fixed in upcoming developer tool releases for Visual Studio, but there is a workaround. (For development environments only!!!)
*** Use your host file to set the FQDN to the physical IP address of the development server. ***
To do this, follow these steps:
- Open your Host file in Notepad (you may need to run Notepad as an administrator). The Host file is located at c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
- Add an entry to the host file to set the site collection web site to the physical IP address of the development server
- Save
Visual Studio was able to connect immediately, no reboot required!