Some have complained about FrontPage Extensions for it seems like ages.  Over the years though, they have filled the bill and allowed many different development tools, quickly and easily, to work on remote servers.  You just kind of consider that functionality as part of Windows.  Opps..

Well, when I switched over to Windows 2008 Server, I was surprised to not find my old friend there.  The answer was a form of FTP that is supposed to work on a shared IP, but is not integrated into many tools, or to use WebDAV, which is also not integrated into the tools I need and would result in mapping a network drive to handle it with some tools.  Just not as simple or clean as it was with FPSE (FrontPage Server Extensions).

After a bit of research, it appears Microsoft has spun off the FPSE to a third party and they have a version that is supposed to work with Windows 2008 Server.  Before I would think about that, I tried using the FTP which did not work as I needed.  Then I tried WebDAV and found it had some problems with large files and was more-or-less a pain to deal with after coming from a FPSE background.

I posted messages around in different forums including one of Microsoft’s about solution to the problem and how to handle this moving forward.  Still no replies yet, it is almost like no one is working with it in that area.  Perhaps those that work with it have the luxury of dedicated IP’s for all their sites and can use secure FTP without all the hassles.  Still though, that does limit some of the functionality of Visual Studio that has worked for years with FPSE.

I found and played just a bit with Web Deploy framework that works with Visual Studio 2010 to build deploy packages to update your server.  For many of the smaller sites though it is kind of like hunting for flies with a shotgun, there is a lot of power there but the older simpler tools would work better.

Well, at the end of the day, or should I say a couple of days, I broke down and put FPSE on the server.  Of course it does not have that integrated feel as it did before in Windows 2003, but at least this was a start.

Currently, I have two issues to dig through.  The first is when I go tot eh admin page for an individual site, it says I do not have the rights to access that page.  This might be left over from moving the files from an older server to the new server.  The other is that if I do not enable FPSE on every site on the server, you can use FPSE to open it without a user name and password.  It must be some simple setting somewhere, but I have not had the time to dig it out yet, I just enabled FPSE for every site for now.

The current conclusion to the story is that I wish Microsoft would have looked a little further than their nose when the decided to pull this technology that has been the friend of many developers for a long time!