I was tring to create an ASP.NET website using Visual Studio.NET 2003 and got the following error that in part says:

"Unable to create web project ... The two need to map to the same server location".

I found so many threads about this with few answers. Here's how I solved my problem.

I was trying to create an ASP.NET website on one of my servers from Visual Studio.NET 2003 on my development machine. The problem was that the directory location of the "Default Web Site" node in IIS on the server did not map to the location where I was trying to create the new application based on the UNC path. For example, I was trying to create the application on the following path:

\\myserver\inetpub$\myapplication

This mapped to the physical location:

G:\Inetpub

... and translates to the URL

http://myserver/myapplication

In IIS on the server I looked at the "Default Web Site" node as this is where IIS will try to create the ASP.NET application because http://myserver translates to this location. Looking at the Home Directory tab at the Local Path parameter I noticed it was pointing to the physical location

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot

So, I simply changed this path to G:\Inetpub and it worked. So this is what the message means by "the two need to map to the same server location".

Don't forget of course that I had to create a UNC share with the appropriate permissions for this to work.

Hope this saves someone some time.