Visual Studio's "The Project Location is not Trusted" Message


Just like all the other developers using Visual Studio, I got this message too. The reason I wrote this post is every post I found about this message gives one of the two reasons listed below although the second reason is the most common and it is not mentioned in MSDN. So the reasons are:

  • If you access a project in a shared folder on the network. This could be solved by copying the project files to the local hard drive or following solution in MSDN to give the project files FullTrust permissions.
  • If you download a zip file from an untrusted website. This is the most common scenario. And this one could be solved by extracting the project again from the zip file you downloaded. But before doing so, right-click the zip file in Windows Explorer and select Properties. At the bottom of the General tab of the Properties dialog box there is a button labeled Unblock, just click it and click OK.
Unblock a Zip File