Is there a way to use VS with a remote site accessible only by sftp?

Question

I'm working with with asp.net and writing a few classes (controls for the CMS) to use on my website. At the moment i'm using a text editor (UE) which has sftp support and syntax highlighting to edit the files and save via sftp. Then i just test it out on the test site. It's working well.. but since i'm very new to c# i'm always looking up methods,argunments etc.

Not unpossible but a pain.

So this is where Visual Studio comes into it. I'd like to use VS so i get auto-complete and the hooks to MSDN. However i'm not interested in setting up a local environment to work in as i already have a test environment at my webhost, and frankly it's the differences between my set up and the host (ie: the CMS, unicode issues, dates...) that are the trickier bits.

Is there a way to use Visual Studio with a remote site accessible only by sftp?

Answer 1

One way to do this would be to mount the SFTP server as a windows drive.

If the SFTP server is on your local network then you can mount it as a windows share. If it is outside your network on in your DMZ, then you can find software that lets you mount the SFTP server as a drive.

Software that allows you to do this include ExpanDrive. This would allow you to use Visual Studio as normal whilst behind the scenes the files are uploaded to and downloaded from the SFTP server as required.

Answer 2

Well, it's an answer:

My first thought is just setup FileZilla to send the directory of your "published" development website. This would be the easiest setup, and frankly the fastest way to get content to your server.

If you are specifically looking for an in-application way to do this:

Visual Studio is setup to accept embedded applications. For example: VIM (Vi Embedded). You can simply load an sFTP savvy embedded app.

One example:

From VIM Docs:

Network-oriented file transfer under Vim is implemented by a VimL-based script () using plugin techniques. It currently supports both reading and writing across networks using rcp, scp, ftp or ftp+<.netrc>, scp, fetch, dav/cadaver, rsync, or sftp.