Archives

Archives / 2009 / September
  • Creating a Microsoft Access Provider for IIS Database Manager

    Following up on my last blog post about the API set for the IIS Database Manager, I have something of a secret to let you in on - you can use the code samples in several of those API documents to create a fully functional provider for Microsoft Access databases. I would never use an Access database in a production environment, but having an Access provider has had some great benefits for me from a test perspective. I often use Access databases for test projects, and using the IIS Database Manager to manage the Access databases on my test systems means that I don't need to install Microsoft Access on any of my test servers.

  • Database Manager API Topics on MSDN

    Today Microsoft released version 1.0 of the IIS Database Manager, which enables you to manage local and remote SQL Server or MySQL databases through the IIS Manager. I cannot stress enough how this module has rapidly become one of my favorite extensions for IIS Manager. There are many times when I need to access the data in one of my databases where opening the database management tool would be inconvenient or impossible. (For example, when I am working remotely, or when I don't have the database management tools installed.) In these situations, the Database Manager has been worth its weight in gold.

  • Hiding your FTP Server Type and Preventing Unauthorized Access

    As evidenced by my How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider with Dynamic IP Restrictions walkthrough and my other FTP authentication extensibility walkthroughs, I spend a lot of time trying to find ways to prevent unauthorized access to my FTP server while still allowing valid users to have easy access to their site content. Today's blog discusses several of the ideas that I like to use on my FTP servers.

  • Creating Recursive Directory Listing Files for FTP Clients

    One of the changes that we made in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 was to remove recursive directory listings, which are commonly retrieved by typing "ls -lR" from a command-line FTP client, which should send a command like "NLST -lR" over FTP to the server. There were several reasons why we decided to remove recursive directory listings, but the main reason was simply to reduce CPU usage on the server; recursive directory listing requests take a lot of resources to fulfill. With that in mind, both FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 will ignore the recursive switch on directory requests.