Robert McMurray

In part 2 of my series on FTP clients, I thought it would be best to have a discussion about the differences between Implicit FTPS and Explicit FTPS. In my recent "FTP Clients - Part 1: Web Browser Support" blog post, I referenced Implicit and Explicit FTPS with a link to my Using FTP Over SSL walkthrough. But it occurred to me that some people may not understand the difference between the two, and my upcoming blog posts are going to build upon that knowledge, so I thought that a quick discussion of these two technologies would be prudent.

Everyone seems to have their own favorite XML editor these days, and there are no shortages of XML editors in the marketplace. The being said, I tend to use Visual Studio 2008 for several reasons, and if you're using Windows notepad or some other editor, here are some of my reasons why you might consider switching:

I had an interesting question from a coworker who was trying to use AppCmd to set the site-level SSL options for an FTP site. This should have been straightforward, and the syntax that he gave me looked correct:

I ran into an interesting problem recently when using the new Worker Processes feature in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager for IIS 7.0. The Worker Processes feature is a great addition to IIS, and it's used to view practical information about the worker processes that are currently in use on your system; for example: the names of application pools that are associated with worker processes, worker process PIDs, CPU and byte usage statistics, etc.

Since we've been testing a lot of FTP clients with our new FTP server for IIS 7, I thought that it would be a good idea to discuss some of the highlights and pitfalls that we have run into when testing various clients.

With the Go Live release for the URL Rewrite Module having just been shipped, I thought that I'd address a problem that you might run into if you're using Digest Authentication. RFC 2069 states that a client sends the server a checksum of the username, password, nonce value, HTTP method, and the requested URI. Unfortunately, when rewriting the URL, the client and server have separate ideas of what the actual URL is, so Digest Authentication will fail when authenticating against a rewritten URL. Here's a practicle example:

We released a new version of UrlScan recently, and one of the great new features in this version is log files that conform to the W3C Extended Log File Format. What this means to administrators is that they can now parse their UrlScan activity using almost any common log utilities, including Microsoft's LogParser 2.2 utility. For anyone that hasn't heard of LogParser, this is a freeware utility from Microsoft that allows you to write SQL-style queries to extract useful information. Eventually I'd like for the following information to show up on the http://learn.iis.net/ web site, but for now I'd like everyone to at least have access to the information.

My good friend Suditi Lahiri has written a terrific blog entry about one of the great new features in the FTP 7 service - which is Event tracing for Windows, or ETW for short. You can read her post at the following URL: