Article explains how to use FTPDrive to map a ftp site as a local drive. So far it works fine in Windows Vista. I'm not sure of the practicality of it right now at home, but it would work fine at my work place where we can only connect to our sites via FTP.
By: Neal Grosskopf
Looks neat, but I could swear that there would be good free software that does the same. Also, what IDE/development environment are you using? It seems that for the most part you should be able to connect to the server through FTP with your IDE - (e.g. like Dreamweaver allows you to). I love virtual drives, "Daemon Tools" and "TrueCrypt" are something worth looking into.
Dreamweaver does allow you to connect to your remote and testing server via FTP but if you use local access as well, when you hit upload, it actually skips the testing server and goes straight to remote thus making testing out of sync. It's also nice to make FTP like local access because you can do site wide replacement. Ideally one shouldn't have to deal with FTP at work but we have a parinoid IT dept. and they believe they can lock down FTP better than local access.
There is a free sluggish version created by novell from way back in the day. It's a bit unreliable though now.
