Tatham Oddie

Delicate Genius has posted an episode of DG.TV from last week’s conference.

http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=734

I can hear the spray cans further up the stair well. It seems the DPE guys are going guerilla in the Microsoft stairwells…

I blogged this morning about how I think WebDAV deserves to see some more love.

I found it somewhat surprising that doing a search for iis7 webdav “invalid parameter” only surfaces 6 results, of which none are relevant. I found this particularly surprising considering “invalid parameter” is the generic message you get for most failures in the Windows WebDAV client.

I was searching for this last night after one of my subfolders stopped being returned over WebDAV, but was still browsable over HTTP. After a quick visit to Fiddler, it turned out that someone had created a file on the server with an ampersand in the name and the IIS7 WebDAV module wasn’t encoding this character properly.

It turns out that this issue, along with some other edge cases, has already been fixed. If you’re using the IIS7 WebDAV module, make sure to grab the update:

Update for WebDAV Extension for IIS 7.0 (KB955137) (x86)
Update for WebDAV Extension for IIS 7.0 (KB955137) (x64)

Because  the WebDAV module is not a shipping part of Windows, you won’t get this update through Windows Update. I hope they’ll be able to start publishing auto-updates for components like this soon.

I’m a massive fan of WebDAV.

At Fuel Advance (the parent company behind projects like Tixi), we operate a small but highly mobile work force. We don’t have an office, and we need 24/7 access to our business systems from any Internet connection. VPN links are not an option for us – they suck over 3G and don’t work through most public networks.

Enter WebDAV. It’s a set of HTTP verbs which give you read/write access to a remote folder and its files, all over standard HTTP. The best part is that Windows has native support for connecting to these shares. Now, we all have drive letter access to our corporate data over the public Internet. It’s slim and fast without all the management overheads that something like Sharepoint would have dealt us. It’s also cross platform, allowing us to open the same fileshares from our machines running Mac OS X.

IIS6 had reasonable support for WebDAV, but for various (and good!) reasons, this was dropped from the version that shipped as IIS7. In March this year, the team published a brand new WebDAV module as a separate download. This module is built using the new integrated pipeline in IIS7 and is much more nicely integrated into the management tool.

Kudos to Keith Moore, Robert McMurray and Marchel Cohn (no blog) for delivering this high quality release!