June 18th, 2008C# admin for Distributed file System link
I am heavily involved in designing, building some large intranet and internet Microsoft based web hosting platforms. Many of these platforms are designed to allow consolidation of existing applications on to a load balanced web farm. As the quality of the source code is unknown , and many employ file upload techniques I extensively use a CIFS backend for web content, once you get past all the smoke and mirrors with IIS connecting to content on the UNC share. You have to consider how this UNC path is managed. To reduce any future implications of file server changes DFS provides an excellent way to alias in the REAL UNC path in a manner which is understood by all of the modern windows operating systems. But then you have to create and possibly destroy DFS links on the fly , as part of your automated site creation processes.
Version 1 of my automation scripts, used a SHELL to call DFSCMD.exe, while this works it is less than ideal,
After many hour of internet searching, I came across http://pinvoke.net and a few articles on calling netapi32.dll from c#
http://jkhines.com/blogs/code/archive/2007/12/15/access-dfs-from-net-posted.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb524805(VS.85).aspx
A FEW hours later I have a working .net 3.5 assembly to add and remove DFS links, Sorted
