Remote Desktop Web Connection

Question

I understand pretty well that Windows RDP works on TCP port 3389, I came across Remote Desktop Web Connection feature in IIS that adds tsweb access, my question is, does Remote Desktop Web Connection use http protocol as a transport protocol over port 80? Or is tsweb just an ActiveX control that acts as an rdp client and connects normally to 3389?

Answer 1

Windows Remote Desktop Services (RDS) role have a IIS feature called "Remote Desktop Gateway". This gateway makes the TSWeb ActiveX to tunnel the RDP session through an HTTPS channel (port 443) instead of having it acting as an RDP client (using the mstsc COM object probably) on port 3389.

If you don't mind trying an open source alternative, written in C# (.NET) and also using a IIS gateway (but not the RDS one), without any plugin browser side (and working in all browsers, HTML 4 and 5), I released recently Myrtille.