Robert McMurray

Earlier today one of my coworkers, John Bocharov, asked me if I had ever done any WebDAV coding in .NET - specifically sending PUT and DELETE requests. I replied that I had, but it had been several months ago, and each time that I had written any WebDAV-related code samples it was for a specific purpose and not very exhaustive. Just the same, I promised John that if I found any of my old code samples I would send them to him. After a bit of searching through my archives I was able to find enough code snippets to throw together a quick sample for PUT and DELETE that John could use, but it made me start thinking about putting together a more complete sample by adding a few extra WebDAV methods, thereby creating a better example to keep around.

Several months ago I read the following article and I found it fascinating, albeit in a humorous way:

Like many people I know, I get a lot of email from various industry-related publications; some of the emails are spam, and the others are from computer magazines that I subscribe to. (And there are several of those. ;-] )

A few months ago I wrote a blog post that was titled "Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs - Part 2", where I described how to merge my FTP Dynamic IP Restrictions Authentication Provider walkthrough with my FTP Provider that Sends an Email when Files are Uploaded walkthrough. The result of this code combination was a custom FTP authentication provider that provides support for dynamic IP restrictions that sends me an email every time a new IP address is blocked. I deployed this custom FTP authentication provider on one of my public-facing FTP sites when I wrote the blog post, and in the three months that I have been using that provider it has blocked 88 IP addresses.

Recently I ran into an interesting situation when I was rolling out a new web-based application. I had tested it on my development server, and because it was a rather complex application I wanted to test it on my production server before making it live. I had already set up a placeholder web site with a home page that announced the new site as "Coming Soon," and I had some of the supporting infrastructure configured for the placeholder site: database connections, permissions, FTP bindings, etc.

I ran into one of those strange situations the other day where you feel like you've been doing the same thing on your computer at some time in the distant past - kind of like déjà vu for geeks. In this specific case, I was moving some web sites that I am hosting for other people that still use FPSE from an older physical server to a new virtual server that is hosted through Hyper-V. (I'm also trying to convert them all to WebDAV, but that's another story.)

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.

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.