Dispatch - Visual Studio 2005 FTP Upload

I've been working on a website for my home owners association (HOA from here on) recently (converting it to ASP.Net). The website includes tons of documents (pdfs and such) and pages (it includes PHPBB). As you can probably imagine, whenever I make a change to the site, I need to upload it to the web host.

Now perhaps I didn't have it configured properly, but I found the FTP support in Visual Studio 2005 (VS from here on) to be woefully inadequate. Perhaps I didn't have it configured right, but it seems that VS wanted to upload the entire website every time I published it. Not only that, but VS completely froze while it did this (no feedback to the user on progress and couldn't do anything else while it was uploading). This might be ok if you only have 1 or 2 files, but when you have hundreds of files, some of them quite large, this is absurd.

The HOA site is currently hosted by Yahoo! Small Business hosting (no, this is not where the ASP.Net 2 hosting is going to be). Yahoo! provides a tool called Yahoo! Site Builder to help build your website. Overall I find the tool crap (though perhaps it is great for users without several years of web development experience), however, their publishing mechanism is great. It keeps track of the files that have been modified and only uploads those.

Well, obviously the VS FTP support was not going to work for me, so I went to Google and hunted down a tool that would provide better support. I found Dispatch. Dispatch is a simple plug-in to VS that keeps track of which files have been updated and allows you to upload those files to the server without causing VS to freeze while you do so and also provided nice feedback on the progress as well.

Dispatch also provides the ability to download remote items as well. Unfortunately it's not obvious how to do that. You first need to right-click on a folder and select "Show Remote View Overlay" and then you get download options. I can understand the need for that (it needs to establish the remote connection in order to do that), but it would be nice to have some sort of contextual help to let you know what is going on. For instance, provide the same context menu whether or not they have connected. If the user hasn't connected yet, prompt to see if they want to.

I don't think that Dispatch would work well in a team environment, but I doubt if a project being developed by a team would require FTP upload. At $15, Dispatch seems to be priced for hobbyists anyway. Overall, I think that Dispatch is a great plugin for VS. It's what Microsoft should have done. If you are working on a website and don't require the formality of a complex build process, Dispatch will make your life much simpler.

I should mention that I also use Beyond Compare for FTP access to the HOA site. It allows me to view what files are different between the local and remote copies and also allows me to view what those differences are. Very handy when you aren't sure what version is accurate or if you don't remember what you changed. Now if only Dispatch had a mechanism to hook up a file diff tool such as Beyond Compare, that would really be something!

My Favorite Tools

Here is a list of some of my favorite tools that I use on a regular basis (ok, some of them I just started using today :).

In order to keep this post a reasonable length, I wasn't able to include all of the features for each product that I wanted to. So if something seems moderately interesting, check out the link to find out about all of the features that it provides.

• Google Desktop Search (Free) - Considering Outlooks terrible search engine, Google Desktop Search has proven very useful for finding emails concerning specific issues. I just type in the issue id into the search box (pops up by pressing Ctrl twice) and voila, every piece of correspondence associated with that issue.
  
• Quick Launch for Google Sidebar (Free) - I've tried several diffent ways of organizing my most commonly accessed tools, projects, documents, etc and this is definitely the easiest. I just create a directory structure with a bunch of shortcuts in it and QuickLaunch shows them in a small window within the Google Sidebar and allows me to quickly navigate to the item I'm interested in and launch it with a single click without having to clutter my desktop with more windows.
  
• Thunderbird (Free) - Easy to use tool for viewing news groups and rss feeds. It is closely associated with Firefox.
  
• Firebird (Free) - A very nice relational database that is completely FREE! One of the best features is that there is a version that can simply be copied to the bin directory of your exe without any fancy installation. Great for embedded databases. It can also be placed on a server and can support very large databases with many connections (according to the website anyway:).
  
• IB Expert (Free) - If you are going to use Firebird, you'll want to use IB Expert to manage your databases. It's actually quite a nice database management tool with plenty of handy features.
  
• Zip Genius (Free) - I've had the need for a command-line zip utility and ZipGenius works great for that. It also has a good Windows interface, though I've never had the need for anything more complicated than the built-in compression utility in Windows XP.
  
• NUnit (Free) - Every developer needs a good unit test utility and NUnit is the one for .Net developers.
  
• The Regulator (Free) - A very useful regular expression evaluator. I can't imagine trying to create a complicated regular expression without this tool.
  
• Reflector (Free) - If you don't have access to the source code, the Reflector is the next best thing. It can decompile most .Net binaries into the programming language of your choice. Very handy for learning about poorly documented features and figuring out how to get around bugs that won't be fixed until the next release of .Net (if you're lucky).
  
• Process Explorer (Free) - A super-charged version of Windows Task Manager. My favorite feature is the ability to add descriptions to all of the processes so that you can determine what processes should and should not be running. It also gives you the ability to kill handles to files without killing the process (very handy if you want to delete a file that is locked by a required Windows process).
  
• Color Cop (Free) - Handy little color picker that lets you determine the color for any pixel on your screen (much simpler than taking a screenshot and pasting it into a image editor that has a color picker). One of the neatest features is that the tool doesn't have to be installed, it can simply be copied into the directory that you want (for me it's my QuickLaunch directory).
  
• Paint.Net (Free) - A MS Paint replacement. A simple image editor that can create moderately complex images (it's not Adobe Photoshop, but at the price, I ain't complainin'). It supports layers, different effects, and several other features that are needed for creating a reasonable image. I mainly use it for cropping screenshots before I send them in an email (it works great for that!).
  
• Refactor! ($99) - An outstanding refactoring tool for Visual Studio 2005 users. Once you use it, you'll never understand how you could have developed without it. There is also a free version available for VB.Net users.
  
• Beyond Compare ($30) - A diff tool that is easy to use outside of a source control tool. I especially like the ability to compare files and directories directly from the Windows Explorer context menu. If you are using VSS 2005 (or one of several other supported source control tools), you can setup Beyond Compare as the default diff tool.
  
• PS Hot Folders ($19.95) - This is an awesome utility that allows me to quickly navigate to my "favorite" directories (beyond Desktop, My Documents, and My Computer) in any standard Windows Open and Save dialog. No more hunting for my development or download directories.
  

If you notice any great tools that I've missed, please post a comment so that I can check it out.