Simulating an UNC path with a leading dot

Question

Being a C# .NET Windows Forms developer, some customers are running our applications on an Apple OS X Mac inside a Parallels virtual machine.

Parallels presents host folders to the guest Windows as UNC paths with a leading dot like

\\.psf\Home\Some\More\Folders

Now an application of us cannot handle the leading dot correctly when accessing files from these kind of shares ("Invalid URI, cannot analyze host name" exception).

I want to debug and fix this issue, unfortunately I do have no Mac and Parallels around here to test it.

My question is:

Is there a way to "simulate" this kind of share on a normal Windows server or client so that I'll be able to debug my application with Visual Studio?

What I tried so far:

I already tried to edit my HOSTS file to contain an entry like

# ...
127.0.0.1       .psf
# ...

but Windows just seems to not recognize the share at all.

Update

Since it seems it is not possible, what I want to achieve, I solved my issue by installing the Windows Version of Parallels and thus enabling me to remote-debug the issue.

Thanks for your time and your comments!

Answer 1

You cannot do it the way you are trying, at least per Microsoft. I quote: "Names can contain a period (.). However, the name cannot start with a period." It is probably hardcoded to work that way.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909264