Visual Studio 2019: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: "Access to the path "C:/" was denied

Question

i am currently trying to develop a small c# script to screenshot a website.

I`m working with Visual Studio 2019 and my code is the following:

var service = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService();
        ChromeOptions option = new ChromeOptions();


        option.AddArgument("--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/40.0.2214.85 Safari/537.36");

        service.HideCommandPromptWindow = false;
        //option.AddArgument("--headless");

        ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(service, option);

        driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitWait = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60);


        driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://www.google.com");


        OpenQA.Selenium.ITakesScreenshot screenshotDriver = driver as OpenQA.Selenium.ITakesScreenshot;
        OpenQA.Selenium.Screenshot screenshot = screenshotDriver.GetScreenshot();
        screenshot.SaveAsFile("C:/", OpenQA.Selenium.ScreenshotImageFormat.Png);

Now i get this error message:

System.UnauthorizedAccessException: "Access to the path "C:/" was denied.

I experimented with many different folders and it doesn't work with any of them. I tried opening Visual Studio as an administrator, but this did not solve the problem.

I guess it has something to do with missing write permissions for Visual Studio.

How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

You are getting System.UnauthorizedAccessException because ,trying to overwrite your Screenshots directory with a .png file. you can use this method

  public static string GetImageDirectory()
    {
        string cur = Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);
        string imageDir = Path.Combine(cur, @"..\..\", "Images");
        SetAccessRule(imageDir);
        return imageDir;
    }

then

screenshot.SaveAsFile(GetImageDirectory(), ScreenshotImageFormat.Png);