Just Sayin’ More Words

Dispatch

FULL DISCLOSURE: I was inspired to write this mini review because of an offer by the maker of this software for a free license for blogging about their software (the offer is posted on the front page of their web site). Below is an unbiased review (you’ll have to take my word for it).

I was looking through the programming section of Digg today and came across Dispatch for ASP.NET by Yellow Cup. Having found myself frequently frustrated with Visual Studio 2005’s “Copy Web Site” function, I thought I’d give it a try.

The Good

Setup was straightforward and painless. Dispatch adds a tab to your Visual Studio environment and lists the projects in your solution. After entering FTP information to configure the site for deployment, you’ll see all the files in your web site. Checking the box next to a file marks it for upload. By default, it will also mark any changed files for upload as well. There’s built-in filtering to ignore files you don’t want uploaded (e.g. solution/project files, etc.). The integration into VS is seemless and intuitive. The “Remote View Overlay” feature is excellent for showing you what does and doesn’t exist locally and remotely (in my opinion, this feature should be on by default).

The Bad

Accessing some of the features isn’t exactly clear at first (you have to right click on the site…toolbar buttons would make more sense and be more discoverable). If you run a compare and a large number of items get checked and you try to uncheck them from the top level, it can take awhile and there’s no status update so it looks like VS is hung up. The “Compare Against Local” and “Compare Against Server” functions seem redundant when Remote View Overlay is on (and are poorly named). And lastly, there’s no support for precompiled sites (ala Web Development Projects which is my typical deployment method).

Conclusion

If you want a better FTP function right in Visual Studio 2005 and you don’t precompile your sites before deployment, I’d give Dispatch a try. It’s currently in beta and will cost $14.95 when the final version is released.