I'm tasked with a project at work which involves FTP'ing small (6k) files to an outsourced delivery service provider. Less importantly, we need to collect a 100k file from their drop box every 12 hours or so (the timing is not critical).

Ideally, the sending/receiving would be initiated automatically by a timer of some sort (but a manual method would be a good starting point!).

I'm learning IIS and Visual InterDev along with some of Bill's other transient technologies but I need somebody to point me in the right direction on the FTP'ing side.

I guess I could do something in C or VB using some pre-existing functionality, not sure what though? My gut instinct tells me that even semi-reliable (automatic) FTP is not something I can take for granted. At the same time I don't want (nor have time) to reinvent the wheel either.

I'm hoping somebody here can give me some pointers - please!

It's a knee-jerk response, but if you are looking for "simple" the first thing that comes to mind is ncftp.

I'd just do it with batch files, calling the command-line FTP.EXE with a text script. Done it before, worked fine. I've even had the batch files build the FTP script on-the-fly with ECHO commands so that it's essentially a zero-footprint solution.

No sense in working too hard at something so simple...

Perl and its Net::FTP module (standard with most distributions these days, especially on Win32) might also be useful.