Our website code is all running properly but Visual Studio Community 2015 cannot display any of our .aspx pages in Design view apparently due to error below. When Design view is requested Master Page Error displays with message "The Master Page file '~/....[all of our master page files] ........' cannot be loaded. We have login code on all master pages which is calls the AspNetSqlMembershipProvider. The website functions fully ONLINE and login functions work. The only problem we have is rendering them in Visual Studio Design view. When using Visual Studio for Web 2012 and running under Windows Server 2003 the Design view worked fine. Problem occurred when we migrated to a Windows Server 2012 VM hosting. We are using FTP to access website code.
ERROR MESSAGE DISPLAYED by Visual Studio for all of our .aspx pages.
ASP.NET runtime error: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS. Calls out Line 147 web.config
This is the code beginning at Line 147.
<membership defaultProvider="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider"> <providers> <clear/> <add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="LocalDBConnectionString" minRequiredPasswordLength="5" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" applicationName="membershipSampleApp"/> </providers> </membership>