Archives

Archives / 2009
  • IIS Videos on Dr. Dobb's Web Site

    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. ;-] )

  • IP Address Lookups for Addresses that were Blocked by FTP Dynamic IP Restrictions

    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.

  • Using URL Rewrite with Web Site Testing

    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.

  • Migrating FPSE Roles Between Servers

    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.)

  • 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.

  • The End of Metabase Corruption (R.I.P.)

    Even though IIS 7 with its new XML-based configuration settings has been around for a while, I was going through some old directories on one of my computers the other day and I stumbled across an image that I had labeled "Metabase Corruption." I have kept that image around for the past decade or so because it's one of the few actual examples of metabase corruption that I have actually verified, although there have definitely been more cases than just the ones that I have seen. But I thought that it might make for a good blog entry to explain the origins of the term "Metabase Corruption" and what that means to you if you're using a version of IIS that is earlier than IIS 7.

  • Automatically Creating Checksum Files for FTP Uploads

    I had a great question in the publishing forums on forums.iis.net, where someone was asking if FTP 7 supported the XCRC command. The short answer is that the XCRC command is not supported, but I came up with a way to create an FTP provider that supports something like it. Since it was a rather fun code sample to write, I thought that I'd turn it into a blog.

  • Merging FTP Extensibility Walkthroughs

    Over the past several months I’ve been publishing a series of walkthroughs that use the extensibility in FTP 7.5 to create a several custom providers for a variety of scenarios, and today I posted my most recent entry in the series:

  • Using Apple's WebDavFS for Mac OS X with WebDAV on IIS 7

    Today's blog post needs to have a disclaimer right up front - I freely admit I'm not a Mac OS X expert, so I may not have everything 100% correct in this post. But I've seen a lot of questions on forums.iis.net that discuss using IIS WebDAV with Mac OS X, so I thought that I'd share a few of the things that I've noticed. Just the same, if I were writing a formal walkthrough I would have said something like, "Microsoft is not responsible for the behavior of Apple's Mac family of products. The information that is provided in this topic is provided to assist Mac OS X users connect to IIS using WebDAV."

  • Using LogParser with FTP 7.x Sessions

    One of the great features that we added to our W3Clogging enhancements in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 is the ability to track unique sessions, which are represented by GUIDs in a field that is named x-session. Because of this addition, you can do some interesting things with LogParser when analyzing your FTP logs.

  • FTP Clients - Part 6: Core FTP LE

    For this installment in my series about FTP Clients, I'd like to take a look at the Core FTP client. For this blog post I used Core FTP Lite Edition (LE) version 1.3c (build 1447) and version 2.1 (build 1603), although all of my screen shots are from version 2.1. Core FTP is available from the following URL:

  • FTP 7.5 Service Extensibility References

    As I pointed out in my recent blog post that was titled "FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released", one of the great new features of the FTP 7.5 service is extensibility. In that blog post I mentioned that I wrote the following walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, and these walkthroughs are all available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site:

  • BLOG - FTP 7.5 Service Extensibility References

    As I pointed out in my recent blog post that was titled "FTP 7.5 and WebDAV 7.5 have been released", one of the great new features of the FTP 7.5 service is extensibility. In that blog post I mentioned that I wrote the following walkthroughs to help developers get started writing providers for the FTP 7.5 service, and these walkthroughs are all available on Microsoft's learn.iis.net Web site:

  • Creating a Read-Only Membership Provider for phpBB 2.0 Users

    I recently posted a blog that was titled Creating a Read-Only Snitz Membership Provider, where I re-used the code from my How to use the Sample Read-Only XML Membership and Role Providers with IIS 7.0 walkthrough on the learn.iis.net web site to write a membership provider for web sites that use the Snitz Forums application. After I finished writing that blog post, I started thinking about the web sites where I use the phpBB 2.0 application, which leads us to today's blog post.

  • 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.

  • New IIS 7.0 Configuration Reference

    For the past several months I have been working with several members of the IIS team on a brand-new configuration reference for IIS 7.0 that describes every configuration setting for IIS in great detail, which is now located at the following URL: