without drifting through the massive amount of boring trolling by users of various operating systems .... The biggest problem, is that a not inconsiderable amount of those 256 characters are 'taken' from you by default paths, for instance with Visual Studio "C:\Users\user.name.domain\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects" and THEN if you have a sensible naming structure you use something akin to the project namespace so "yourapp.company.com", which is then used twice, once for 'solution' level folder and once for each project under it (whatever namespace they use). Only THEN do you actually get to the content folders of your project. To get anywhere near useful you have to ignore all the windows 'friendliness' anyway and create yourself short paths from drive root like 'C:\bill\projects' Bah!