What is _vti_cnf?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Simon Harvey
  • Start date Start date
S

Simon Harvey

Hi chaps,

This is really two related questions.

1. When I create a new ASP.net application in Visual Studio, it
automatically creates a vsdisco document. This doesnt seem to do much. Can
anyone tell me what its for?

2. The vsdisco document references a number of directories that I've often
wondered about under IIS. These all begin with _vti....
Can anyone tell me if I can get rid of these directories as they tend to get
on my nerves and I dont know what they're for.

Thanks to anyone who can help

Simon
 
The _vti directories are all used by the FrontPage Server Extensions. DON'T
DELETE these. If you do, then your web applications may not load properly in
VS.Net because current VS versions create a web application as an FP web
through IIS.

As for the vsdisco, I'm not sure why VS.Net is generating this unless you
are creating a site with web services, since the vsdisco files are typically
used for web service discovery.

Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage
 
I will try to answer your first question, since the second one seems to be
answered already.

vsdisco files are there to support dynamic discovery of Web services. The
file returns references to all asmx and disco files in the host directory
and subdirectories. ASP.NET maps the file name extension .vsdisco to an HTTP
handler that scans the host directory and subdirectories for these files and
returns a dynamically generated DISCO document. A client who requests a
vsdisco file gets back this disco document.

In the beta releases of the Microsoft® .NET Framework, the .vsdisco HTTP
handler was automatically enabled, but in the final release of the Framework
it is not enabled by default. So if you want dynamic discovery to work,
you have to modify the machine.config file- i.e. uncomment the handler.
It was disbaled by default for security reasons since it allows clients to
retrieve some of the details of a machine's Web Service configuration.

Hope this helps.
 
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