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145

answers:

1

Hi there, we've recently stumbled across the excellent Dispatch for ASP FTP deployment plug in. It looks great apart from one thing: It doesn't work with Visual Studio 2010, at least for us, anyway. (It's supposed to work fine.)

(Yes, we've tried everything: We've managed to get Dispatch working for another FTP site, but not the main one we regularly deploy to. We have managed to connect to our main site through FileZilla FTP, so the site itself is configured correctly. All settings have been triple checked, but the software still throws up weird errors (always to do with its internal libraries).)

So does anyone know of any other comparable FTP-based, deployment plug-in for Visual Studio?

Here's what Dispatch does (and so any suggested replacement must do):

  • Monitor any altered files in the project. When a file is changed, it's added to a list of files to be deployed.
  • To deploy these files to the live site, all we need to do is click "Upload" and the plugin will connect via FTP to our live site and upload the selected files.
  • We can filter out any filenames we don't want to be monitored/uploaded (e.g. .cs or web.config or /Images/, etc.)

I think that's all the features that we need. Thanks for any suggestions!

Note: If you're wondering why we need such a service, it's because we deploy many site changes over the course of a single day. Publishing the entire project to a folder, zipping it up, then FTPing that zip file, only to have to unzip it, and then install the entire project into the live wwwroot takes far too long. With Dispatch you're able to upload individual files in a single click.

A: 

After much back and forth between me and the creator of Dispatch, we managed to narrow down the problem to the library he was using (Rebex FTP). I posted a question about the issue on the Rebex forums, and it was revealed that their software might have a bug with IIS7.5. They suggested a quick hack/fix, which I tested and discovered worked.

Mr. Dispatch then quickly implemented this hack/fix into his software, and lo! I had a fully working copy of Dispatch... So no need for a replacement any more!

(And from what I've seen, there isn't even any other plug-ins offering this functionality, so it's just as well.)

Django Reinhardt
Just for record - we DO test Rebex FTP with IIS 7.5. In fact it's one of the configurations that is tested by automated test suite every night. If you have steps to reproduce this problem would it be possible to drop me a note to [email protected]? It can be easily fixed by turning off the FTP feature autodetection and it would be nice to do it automatically if possible. For details see http://forum.rebex.net/questions/279/unable-to-connect-over-ftp . Thanks, Martin.
Martin Vobr
Whoops. Corrected, sorry about that. I actually asked that question you linked to (you can find the same link higher up on this page) but I misread one of the responses. I'll email you with regards to helping you solve this.
Django Reinhardt
I've got your email and forwarded it to the developer responsible for the component. He'll contact you and will try to resolve it. Thanks for your help!
Martin Vobr