Recently, I installed and ran the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (for IT Professionals) (I hope that includes me) on my development machine here at work.  It had a couple of recommendations for securing IIS... 1) Deleting Parent Paths and 2) Running the IIS Lockdown Tool. 

Deleting Parent Paths was painless, but running IIS Lockdown caused a bit more of a headache for me. When I loaded my solution, I was unable to load the Web project (project unavailable in visual studio).  This was no biggie, I thought I'd just re-create the project from SourceSafe. Well when I tried to create a new Web project called “www.vit.org,“ I kept getting this message:

Unable to create Web project 'www.vit.org'. The file path 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\www.vit.org' does not correspond to the URL 'http://localhost/www.vit.org'. The two need to map to the same server location.

To make a long morning short, it turned out that after running IIS Lockdown, I could no longer create a Web project with periods (.'s) in the name.  So, I created the project as “publicweb“ and it worked fine. 

I haven't figured out why this happened yet, and I'm sure there's a good reason for this,  but wanted to report this behavior.