Changing to the root directory with FtpWebRequest

Extracted from: http://blogs.msdn.com/mariya/archive/2006/03/06/544523.aspx

Many customers ask us how they can use the CWD command with our FtpWebRequest.

The answer is: you cannot use the command directly, but you can modify the uri parameter to achieve the same result.

Let's say you're using the following format:

String uri = "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl";

FtpWebRequest Request = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);

Request.Method = "LIST";

The above example will bring you to your user's directory and list all the contents there. Now let's say you want to go 2 directories backwards and list the contents there (provided your user has permissions to do that). You close the previous FtpWebRequest and issue a new one with this uri

uri = "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/%2E%2E/%2E%2E";

This is equivalent to logging in with your user's credentials and then using cd ../../

Note: if you try using the ”..” directly without escaping them the uri class will strip them, so "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/../.." is equivalent to "ftp://myFtpUserName:myFtpUserPassword@myFtpUrl/"

Now let's say you want to go to another user's directory which is one level above the root. If you don't specify a user name and password it's equivalent to logging in as anonymous user. Then you issue a new FtpWebRequest with the following uri

"ftp://myFtpUrl/%2F/anotherUserDir"

This is equivalent to logging in as anonymous and then doing

Cd /

cd anotherUserDirectory

Binding XML data into a DataList, GridView, etc.

Here is a nice article on how to bind sections of an XML file (or string) into a DataList, GridView, etc. using the .NET 2.0 XmlDataSource. Basically, it is the same as binding a SqlDataSource. It is nice since you can bind a subset of the XML rather than the entire data.

http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/061307-1.aspx