FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released!

Over the next few days you're going to hear a lot of details about many of the great new IIS extensions that the IIS feature team is releasing for the 2009 MIX Conference in Las Vegas later today. I don't want to spoil any surprises by talking about anyone else’s feature areas, but I’m about to board a plane to head out on vacation (to Peru!) and I'm not taking a computer with me (believe it or not!) so I thought that I’d take a moment to highlight just a few of the features that are in the FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 releases.

FTP 7.5

One of the great new features in FTP 7.5 is extensibility. We had some extensibility features that were partially implemented in FTP 7.0, and we used those for the ASP.NET and IIS Manager authentication providers, but FTP extensibility was not officially supported in the 7.0 release. With FTP 7.5 extensibility is fully supported, so you can now write providers that implement custom functionality for authentication/authorization, home directory lookups, and logging.

To help developers get started writing providers for FTP 7.5, I wrote the following walkthroughs that are available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net web site:

• For Managed Code Developers:
  • How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider
  • How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Home Directory Provider
  • How to Use Managed Code to Create a Simple FTP Logging Provider
• For Native Code Developers:
  • How to Use Native Code to Create a Simple FTP Authentication Provider
  • How to Use Native Code to Create a Simple FTP Home Directory Provider
  • How to Use Native Code to Create a Simple FTP Logging Provider

Another highlight in FTP 7.5 is the addition of a user interface for the FTP Request Filtering features. We shipped request filtering with FTP 7.0 while the request filtering user interface was still in development, and the 7.5 version seemed like a great time to release it.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with FTP request filtering, it allows you to add rules that allow or deny specific file extensions, hidden segments, URL sequences, and even FTP commands.

For more information about the features in the new FTP service, see the following page on the http://www.iis.net/ web site:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/FTP

WebDAV 7.5

One of the big changes in WebDAV 7.5 is the inclusion of WebDAV locks, which are implemented through a simple locking mechanism. Our lock implementation was still in development when we shipped the WebDAV 7.0 release, and this release should help publishing scenarios where WebDAV locks are required.

To help you get started using locks with WebDAV 7.5, I wrote the following walkthrough that is available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net web site:

How to Use WebDAV Locks

For more information about the features in the new WebDAV module, see the following page on the http://www.iis.net/ web site:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/WebDAV

In Closing...

So that about wraps it up for some of the major highlights for FTP and WebDAV; for news about everything else that's coming out for IIS, watch the news items on the http://www.iis.net/ home page!