My company manages a few hundred web apps, some large where we have a complete dev to staging to production environment. However, the majority of our sites are smaller where live editing is the most economical and practical choice (a small site to me is less then a 50 pages or so, and a total of less then 200 resources such as images, etc). Almost all of our projects run in an ASP.NET 2.0 environment.
Like many things in life, it seems to me that FPSE still falls into the "can't live with em, can't live without em" category. My sys admins hate them, and my designer/content/developer folks love them because it's so much faster then FTP when working in a live edit mode (we use FPSE just for authoring - no webbots, etc). MS has been trying to bury FPSE for a couple of years now, but yet it keeps coming back into the mix.
It's widely noted around the web and in these forums that the built-in FTP features in Visual Web Developer, Visual Studio 2005/2008 and Microsoft Expression is many times slower when working in a live edit mode compared to FPSE. The performance comparison gets worse when you add in common features beyond strictly publishing like search and sync.
I would love to let FPSE go, but I can't seem to find a good fit for live, in place editing when using MS web development tools. Is WEBDAV in IIS7 the web authoring mechanism of the future? From a performance standpoint does anyone have any comparisons or success stories when comparing FTP, FPSE and WEBDAV authoring modes in an IDE for actions like search, sync and publish?
If not WEBDAV is there a setup that I may be missing if I want to stop using FPSE but still need efficient live editing capabilities?