Nov
4
Written by:
xram net
11/4/2009 5:46 PM
I work on a website that needs updates every once in a while, and isn’t large enough to warrant setting up a staging server. I need a good way to connect in Visual Studio without using FrontPage Server Extensions or FTP. From the sound of it, WebDAV over SSL is the way to go.
Setting Up The Server
Obviously, I don’t want anyone that shouldn’t be connecting to be connecting, so I created another site in IIS that only I can see. I accomplished this by binding it to an unused IP but giving a header value of somethingrandom.mainsite.com. Since that DNS entry doesn’t exist, I added it to my hosts file. This way, only my machine knows that name resolves to the correct IP. Anyone else going to that name or IP won’t see it.
Also, something I didn’t realize: if you’re setting this up on Windows Server 2003 x64, and you’ve configured the site to run using 32-bit ASP.NET binaries (for compatibility reasons), then WebDAV will not work—unless you explicitly specify the 32-bit WebDAV service as well. You can do this by running
IIsExt /AddFile %systemroot%\syswow64\inetsrv\httpext.dll 1 WEBDAV32 1 "WebDAV (32-bit)"
Since there’s no native support for WebDAV in Visual Studio, and no support for WebDAV over SSL native to Windows, it looks like some software will be needed.
I was able to find 4 different pieces of software:
- Novell NetDrive – Old, unsupported, unlicensed, and non-functional.
- WiseTodd NetDrive – Free for personal use, connects fine without SSL, not with
- IT Hit Map Drive – The most promising of the bunch, connects fine without SSL, but still won’t connect securely
- South River WebDrive – The grandfather of the WebDAV clients, it’s a tad pricey at $60. But, it works perfectly!
Set-up of WebDrive was a snap, once I got things working properly on the server end. Finally—updates can be made quickly and securely.
Why not FTP?
If you’ve tried working in Visual Studio using FTP, the question quickly becomes “Why FTP?” (or “Do I have time to finish Anna Karenina while waiting for Visual Studio to respond?”). When all you want to do is exit the program and you find that it takes more than 5 minutes to gracefully quit, it’s more than a little frustrating.