ZoneStripper 1.0 released

2004-11-08 james 16 comments

You’ve downloaded the latest, coolest utility (for example, ZoneStripper) 🙂 with source code. The source code is sitting on your local hard drive yet when you launch the solution in Visual Studio .NET 2003, you receive the warning:

The project location is not fully trusted by the .NET runtime. This is usually because it is either a network share or mapped to a network share not on the local machine. If the output path is under the project location, your code will not execute as fully trusted and you may receive unexpected security exceptions.

Your first thought is probably “What the heck? The solution is on my local drive!” What is causing this odd behaviour, you wonder? It’s Windows XP SP2 and Zone Identifiers. ZoneStripper will remove those annoying Zone Identifiers from your downloaded files. Hopefully someone other than myself finds this little utility useful. Enjoy!

.NET Tools none

#1 | Written by Dan Sten about 20 years ago. Reply

Thanks James,

Those "errors" were driving me crazy.
#2 | Written by Paul Shaddick about 20 years ago. Reply

Thanks for bringing an end to hours of frustration!
#3 | Written by Brian Williams about 19 years ago. Reply

Thanks for the great tool! Here’s a good tip to avoid he problem in the first place – Right click on the Zip file, select properties, then click the Unblock button. Zone Ids will not be written to any of the extracted contents. I did this before extracting ZoneStripper and it opened right up in VS
#4 | Written by Andreas Eriksson about 19 years ago. Reply

Thanks! You learn something every day…
#5 | Written by Angie about 19 years ago. Reply

Just what I needed – thanks for sharing your tool – worked great! Great advice about the zip files – I had no idea…
#6 | Written by Wilco van Sonsbeek about 19 years ago. Reply

This is usefull. I have looked in other places in the internet before I came here, and everyone was adjusting (lowering) .net security via the cpl. Wrong thing to do! This instead seems a proper explanation of what is going on. Great. Thanks.
#7 | Written by Morgan about 19 years ago. Reply

Excellent! You saved me a lot of frustration with this one.

Thanks!
#8 | Written by Aaron Asbra about 18 years ago. Reply

Thank you very much for sharing this tool with the rest of us. I spent hours trying to figure out what was going on and this worked perfectly.

I knew there was a reason why I waited until now to upgrade Win XP SP2. It assumes you are an idiot and without so much as a warning message, cripples perfectly valid source code.
#9 | Written by Gaurav Shelar about 17 years ago. Reply

Thanks a million times!
#10 | Written by Brian Noyes about 17 years ago. Reply

James, you rock. Thanks for this utility, this has been driving me nuts.
#11 | Written by Matt about 16 years ago. Reply

I was getting a "the project location is not trusted" message in Visual Studio 2008 and a .NET security exception when trying to read a text file on my own C: drive, and this fixed the security exception right up. I’m still getting the location not trusted message when Visual Studio loads the project, but at tleast the code will run and it can read the text file.

-Matt
#12 | Written by Dan Essin about 16 years ago. Reply

Could you please tell me what is going on?

Thanks,
de

PS C:\cslacs\Visual Studio Templates> "C:\Program Files\ZoneStripper\zonestripper.exe" -r "c:\csla"
You must provide a value expression on the right-hand side of the ‘-‘ operator.
At line:1 char:51
+ "C:\Program Files\ZoneStripper\zonestripper.exe" -r <<<< "c:\csla"
#13 | Written by James Kovacs about 16 years ago. Reply

@Dan – The problem is with PowerShell interpreting "C:\Program Files\ZoneStripper\zonestripper.exe" as a string and then seeing "-" in "-r" as the minus operator. To get around this issue, use the PowerShell call operator (&) followed by the command line as follows:

& "C:\Program Files\ZoneStripper\zonestripper.exe" -r "c:\csla"

Now "C:\Program Files\ZoneStripper\zonestripper.exe" is treated as a script or program to run and the remainder of the line treated as command line arguments.

HTH,
James
#14 | Written by Matt F about 15 years ago. Reply

Thanks a lot.

-Matt, New Zealand
#15 | Written by John Angelini – Philly XAML.org about 15 years ago. Reply

Thank you so much. Nothing worse than trying to show a client a solution youve been working on for them adn cant run it (App requires Full Trust) because of this error. I struggled with this for awhile and am so thankful you did this.
#16 | Written by John Angelini – Philly XAML.org about 15 years ago. Reply

One more thing to add… If Visual Studio has to do a upgrade conversion of the project, it will ignore the Zone Identifier. ie I downloaded the ZoneStripper Source Code which threw the error in VS 2005, but not in 2008 using the same solution.

Thanks again.

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ZoneStripper 1.0 released

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