Building FTP Services Using .NET 2.0

by Wei-Meng Lee
12/12/2006

.NET 2.0 provides new managed classes for performing FTP accesses: FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse, which are derived from the WebRequest and WebResponse classes, respectively. Using these two new FTP classes, you can now incorporate FTP functionality into your applications easily. In this article, I will show you how to perform the most common FTP functions using these two new classes.

For this article, I will use the FTP service that is provided in Windows XP. My FTP site directory is mapped to C:\Inetpub\ftproot\. Figure 1 shows the initial content of my FTP directory.

Figure 1. The initial content of my FTP directory

All the coding in this article uses the two namespaces below:

Imports System.Net
Imports System.IO

Also, the following constant is defined:

    Const ftpURI As String = "ftp://127.0.0.1/"

In this article, I assume that the FTP server is configured for anonymous access and it is installed locally on your computer.

Downloading a Text File

To download a text file using FTP:

1. Create an instance of the FtpWebRequest class using the Create() method of the WebRequest class. The Create() method takes in a URI parameter (containing the path for the text file to be downloaded).
2. Set the command to be sent to the FTP server using the Method property of the FtpWebRequest class; in this case this command is DownloadFile.
3. Specify the login credential to the FTP server.
4. Obtain the response from the FTP server using the GetResponse() method from the FtpWebRequest class.
5. Retrieve the stream that contains response data sent from an FTP server using the GetResponseStream() method from the FtpWebResponse class.

Note that you can use a StreamReader object to read the content of the text file:

Try
    Dim filename As String = ftpURI & "test.txt"
    Dim ftpReq As FtpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create(filename)

    ftpReq.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.DownloadFile
    ftpReq.Credentials = New NetworkCredential("anonymous", "password")

    Dim ftpResp As FtpWebResponse = ftpReq.GetResponse
    Dim ftpRespStream As Stream = FTPResp.GetResponseStream

    Dim reader As StreamReader
    reader = New StreamReader(ftpRespStream, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8)
    Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd)
Catch ex As Exception
    MsgBox(ex.ToString)
End Try

Downloading an Image File

If you want to download an image file from an FTP server and then directly bind it to, say, a PictureBox control, you can use the steps outlined above and then use the FromStream() method from the Image class to convert the response from the FTP server (containing the image) into an image:

Try
    Dim filename As String = ftpURI & "phidgetRFID.jpg"
    Dim ftpReq As FtpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create(filename)
    ftpReq.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.DownloadFile
    ftpReq.Credentials = New NetworkCredential("anonymous", "password")

    Dim FTPResp As FtpWebResponse = ftpReq.GetResponse
    Dim ftpRespStream As Stream = FTPResp.GetResponseStream

    PictureBox1.Image = Image.FromStream(ftpRespStream)
Catch ex As Exception
    MsgBox(ex.ToString)
End Try

Downloading a Binary File

To download a binary file (in fact, any type of files, including text files) from an FTP server, the easiest way would be to use the WebClient class.

1. First, create a new instance of the WebClient class.
2. Specify the login credential to the FTP server.
3. Download the file from the FTP server using the DownloadData() method from the WebClient class. Note that you need to specify the full pathname of the file to be downloaded from the FTP server.
4. The DownloadData() method returns a byte array, which you can save directly onto a file using the WriteAllBytes() method from the My.Computer.FileSystem class.

Try
    Dim filename As String = ftpURI & "phidgetRFID.jpg"
    Dim client As New WebClient
    client.Credentials = New NetworkCredential("anonymous", "password")
    My.Computer.FileSystem.WriteAllBytes(".\phidgetRFID.jpg", _
       client.DownloadData(filename), True)
    MsgBox("File downloaded!")
Catch ex As Exception
    MsgBox(ex.ToString)
End Try

Note that you can also use the DownloadFile() method from the WebClient class to download and save a file directly to disk.

Uploading a Binary File

To upload a binary file (including text files) to an FTP server:

1. First, create a new instance of the WebClient class.
2. Specify the login credential to the FTP server.
3. Upload the file to the FTP server using the UploadFile() method from the WebClient class. Note that you need to specify the full pathname of the file to be uploaded to the FTP server.

Try
    Dim filename As String = ftpURI & "PING.bmp"
    Dim client As New WebClient
    client.Credentials = New NetworkCredential("anonymous", "password")
    client.UploadFile(filename, "C:\PING.bmp")
    MsgBox("File uploaded!")
Catch ex As Exception
    MsgBox(ex.ToString)
End Try

Note that you can also use the UploadData() method from the WebClient class to upload an array of bytes.

Figure 2 shows the contents of my FTP directory after uploading the file PING.bmp.

Figure 2. The contents of my FTP directory after uploading the file

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