FTP Login using Windows Credentials.

Question

We have a C# windows application that needs to be able to connect to a server on a network, download and save a file to a specified location. We can not use a web service as we can not assume that our clients will have IIS on their server.

The way that I am considering doing it is to FTP onto the server and download the file. I can write the code to connect to the server and located the file but I have 2 questions.

1. Is there a way of using the windows credentials to FTP on to the remote server? (I understand that I cannot directly get the user's password).

2. Is there a better way of getting the file from a server other than ftp-ing on to it?

Thanks for the advice.

Answer 1

I'm assuming that a network share isn't an option (perhaps an external site etc).

Note that IIS isn't the only way of hosting a web-service. With WCF, you can use a console exe or a windows service to host the WCF service, which would allow you to run WCF on the server without any mention of IIS. See here. Then all you need is line-of-sight to the server, and some code that returns the file (or chunks of it, or a stream of it).

Answer 2

Depending on the size of the file (e.g. if it is less than 4MB) - you might consider leveraging a public MSMQ mechanism.