Question

I am writing an application in .NET Winform. The data files produced are required to upload to our server.

I dont know what are the approaches supporting for this? The one came to my mind immediately is FTP. Is there any other way in .NET Winform?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

FTP is the easiest and what I would recommend in this situation.

Some alternatives in order of what I think suits best:

HTTP, very good support, basically plug&play, just like FTP.

TCP/IP, the basics of most networking protocols, not too difficult to implement, but you need to have it running on your server machine.

NNTP, but that requires different kinds of encoding, Base64 will do, but that’ll result in having to upload way much more than necessary. yEnc solves this problem but is more difficult to implement.

SMTP, send a mail with an attachment, have the server pick it up from there.

All of these are supported in the .Net Framework except NNTP, for which you’ll have to use an external library.

I still highly recommend FTP, example from MSDN:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

namespace Examples.System.Net
{
    public class WebRequestGetExample
    {
        public static void Main ()
        {
            // Get the object used to communicate with the server.
            FtpWebRequest request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("ftp://www.contoso.com/test.htm");
            request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;

            // This example assumes the FTP site uses anonymous logon.
            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential ("anonymous","[e-mail]");

            // Copy the contents of the file to the request stream.
            StreamReader sourceStream = new StreamReader("testfile.txt");
            byte [] fileContents = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sourceStream.ReadToEnd());
            sourceStream.Close();
            request.ContentLength = fileContents.Length;

            Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();
            requestStream.Write(fileContents, 0, fileContents.Length);
            requestStream.Close();

            FtpWebResponse response = (FtpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

            Console.WriteLine("Upload File Complete, status {0}", response.StatusDescription);

            response.Close();
            }
        }
    }
}

Or if you don’t want to do it the traditional way, go for WCF, which is more like a combination of all of these, and you just configure what it does under the hood.