Description: .Net Development and anything else
Recently, I was working on a group project where we had a simple requirement to download prerequisites for the application we were building. That is, the application needed and expected certain components to be installed on the system (i.e. SQL Server Express, Crystal Reports, device drivers, etc.). After some research, it was decided to leverage the Background Intelligent Transfer Service ( BITS ) that is built into the Windows machine. BITS allows you to transfer files between client and server and it has
The application we were bulding is a WPF application written in C#. We tried to leverage as many libraries available in order to expedite development and so for communicating with BITS we leveraged SharpBITS , a .NET wrapper of the BITS API. Using SharpBITS is outside the scope of this post but if you’d like more information on using this library, there is a nice post that is very educational here . So, using public accessible urls to the files stored in Amazon S3, things worked beautifully. BITS is a workh
The Problem A great way to lock down files in Amazon S3 and to access them is to generate presigned urls. The urls are only valid for a time period and the credentials are embedded into the signature process and sent along via the query string parameters in the url. Here’s a sample presigned url: