WebDAV coming (short)

davcox — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 17:49:00 GMT

Some people were asking me about webdav in IIS for Vista ... and you're right it's not there. But check out Keith Moore's blog on the future of webdav with IIS (I was impressed). Keith's background is somewhat legendary on the team and so I have high expectations for what they will produce for a new and improved webdav module for IIS7.

I don't know how many people have been using webfolders (and a lot of other products and services) and not known that under the covers they were using DAV.

One example is that with Windows XP and Windows Vista, you can do "net use * http://intranet-site/mywebdav/" which will effectively map a drive to a particular webdav enabled virtual directory. It's a pretty cool feature ... and in fact we use webdav to move around files in our own test infrastructure.

Some of the history of WebDAV is that it was written by a team in Exchange, which used the same code for DAV-EX (WebDAV against an exchange store), DAV-FS (WebDAV against the file system which is what IIS used) and DAV-SQL (WebDAV against a SQL store). This team no longer exists and cannot support WebDAV that we have shipped with IIS; so Keith, Robert and Marchel have taken on this charter to do a simplified and more performant version of WebDAV that fits into the IIS7 "Module" programming model. The cool thing about this is that we already have a large automation suite that we can use to test WebDAV, so I expect we'll have a high-quality release.

I hope to get more into bloggin here soon ... perhaps the new year will bring more time ... :)

Dave's Blog : DAV

WebDAV coming (short)