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I'm developing a windows application in C# along with an accompanying asp.net website. Both are hosted on a web server. I wish to disguise my server ip address and/or domain name so they are not exposed to the user at any point.

I designed a custom browser in C# (win app) then I just navigated user to my asp.net site. I haven't kept address bar and I disabled right click option in that browser. So the user just can view the page, cant find the server info.

But the issue that I'm facing now is, when the user tries to download anything from the site, Internet Explorer's download window opens up and asks where to save. But there in the screen it shows my server ip or domain address to the user.

So how can I hide that information from the user i.e. I don't want to show my server's information to my users but I want them to download or save from my site.

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    Hi Ren, any user could find your server's ip address by pinging your domain name. Could you explain why seeing the ip is a problem for you?
    – toomanyairmiles
    Feb 1, 2012 at 6:55
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    Exactly... I don't understand why you'd go to such lengths to hide your server domain or IP. Most of the time this is a bad idea and developers want to do the opposite--allow the user to make sure they're downloading from a safe source. If you don't want your users to know about a host, then you shouldn't make it a public server; use a different server/domain to serve the downloads.
    – Lèse majesté
    Feb 1, 2012 at 7:06
  • (This is a really weird question, at least as fat as it's presented) Could you explain why whatever it is you're doing involves both a native(Windows) application and a web site/app? I don't think it's even clear what's going on in the first place for anyone to be advising you what to do about it. This question might not even belong here.
    – Su'
    Feb 1, 2012 at 10:08
  • The user can see what sites they are connecting to using netstat whether you hide it or not. If this is security by obscurity then it won't work.
    – JamesRyan
    Feb 1, 2012 at 13:55

1 Answer 1

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Without knowing a bit more about your context it's a bit hard to provide a better solution, however rather than writing a custom web browser that allows users to browse your site, and download things why not do something along the lines of:

In your windows application, call a service on your website that gives you the relevant details of downloads available.

Display those details directly in your application, giving the user the option to download them as needed, you can use the standard windows Save File dialogs for this.

Then open an HttpWebRequest to your server from your application to download the file and save it to the users preferred location - you'll want to do this asynchronously so that you don't lock up the application's UI and you'll probably need to display a progress bar to the user as well.

However, if a user wants to they will still be able to find out the details of the server using an application such as Fiddler if they were that way inclined.

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  • Fine Zhaph..As because I'm a newbie can you pls help me. Now anyway I displayed the site through .net browser. Can you please guide me how to initiate save as dialog when the user clicks any downloads in my site. so that I can disable the default download dialog of IE. Also please say me progress bar increment for our downloading file (save as).. Thank you Zhaph
    – Ren InfoTech
    Feb 1, 2012 at 12:25
  • @RenInfoTech What I meant was that if you don't want the user to see your domain/server details, you shouldn't be using any "browser" sort of control, and without knowing how you've implemented it it's hard to say - but if you're using the WebBrowser class, there's no simple way to disable the default save dialog. You would need to rebuild that part of your application to not use the WebBrowser class - hence me suggesting a webservice to send your app details of available downloads.
    – Zhaph - Ben Duguid
    Feb 1, 2012 at 13:32
  • It is a site which displays thumbnails of videos like youtube when the user clicks the thumbnail it gets downloaded.. so how can write a webservice for this Zhap.. can you show me a tutorial related this. so let me initiate and get guidance from you later..
    – Ren InfoTech
    Feb 1, 2012 at 14:33

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