Code Samples

How to send SMTP email using Telnet

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:08:00 GMT

How to send SMTP email using Telnet

This is an old method of sending email using Telnet. I've posted it here mostly for a remider to me on exactly how to do this, but thought I would share it with others who may not know of this. This can be useful when testing if a server can successfully send email. For example, I use this to confirm if a SharePoint server can successfully send emails for alerts and notifications.

The items in bold are what you should type.

Start a Telnet session from a command line by entering:
Telnet your.mailserver.com 25

220 a.mail.server.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.2499 ready at Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:59:02 -0600
helo

250 a.mail.server.com Hello [192.168.125.237]
mail from: fromemail@server.com

250 2.1.0 email@server.com...Sender OK
rcpt to: joe@server.com

250 2.1.5 joe@server.com
data

354 Start mail input; end with .
This is a test.
. (enter a dot/period to end the data)

250 2.6.0 Queued mail for delivery

quit
Connection to host lost.

Google Web Part for SharePoint

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:21:00 GMT

Google Search Web Part

Mark Wagner
http://blogs.crsw.com/mark
June 10, 2005

Article: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/1009.aspx

I created a custom Google web part a few weeks ago for my demo SharePoint site. You can see what it looks like on my testing SharePoint home page http://sharepoint.crsw.com. The Google web part submits a search request by navigating the user directly to the Google search web page and performs a Google search using the Google search engine. I have since received a number of emails requesting to get this web part for use on their SharePoint sites, so I decided to make it available for others.

First and foremost, the Google name and search service are the property of Google. I have no affiliation with the Google name and its services.

Google is a must-have resource for my daily work. If I need to find something, I Google it, and nothing else comes close when searching on the Internet. With this dependency, I had to have it on my new SharePoint demo site. My SharePoint demo site is more of a test-harness at this point since it is hosted on a shared/public server, so don’t be too disappointed when you see it.

For those of you not familiar with Google, welcome to the Internet. Google is the single best Internet search service available on the Internet, for the Internet. If you need to find something on the Internet, Google will find it for you. This process of searching is commonly referred to Googling. If you Google something, your are using Google to search the Internet for it. For the rest of you, Google is probably how you found this article.

It is important to remember that this Google Search web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature. In order for Google to find any results, Google must have already searched and indexed your site. Also remember that Google will not be able to crawl and index pages on your SharePoint site that are not accessible to the public. This is where the SharePoint search has the upper hand. Again, this web part is not intended to replace the SharePoint search feature, but to conveniently access the much used Google search from your SharePoint page.

Configuring the Google Search Web Part

Here is a picture of the web part configurations.

Google Image URL

Once you have installed the web part, in the configuration options of the web part is a Google Image URL property which defaults to an image on Google’s web site. You should use the default url for the Google image. I have made this property available just in case Google renames or moves their image.

This Google Search Web Part can be configured in three distinct ways.

Standard Google Search

Local Site Search

Custom Site Search

Complete article here...

Send Email Link for IE

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 10:24:00 GMT

I try not to have any (OK, many) obsessions; however, one is my consumption for information. Because of this I have to strictly monitor myself from deviating from my present task. I am sometimes easily distracted.

To help me remember about “something I found interesting“, I have a nice little custom link button labeled “Send” that I use in my Internet Explorer browser to quickly send myself an email. The email contains a subject and the link to the website in the body. Yes, you can do this by clicking, File > Send > Link by E-Mail, but this is to many clicks for me. Yes, I am impatient and have to work on this also.

This works with one click - much better. Your Links toolbar needs to be turned on to easily access the buttons in IE. I have my located immediately after the Address bar as shown here.

Simply paste the the following javascript code into the URL of the link properties.

javascript:navigate('mailto:YOUR-EMAIL@HERE.COM?subject=LINK:%20'+escape(document.title)+'&BODY='+escape(location.href))

The only thing you need to customize is the YOUR-EMAIL@HERE.COM portion. Here is a sample of the properties dialog.

To create a link button you can drag the “e“ icon in the address bar to the Link toobar. To get the properties, right-mouse-click on a link you want to edit. Here is a sample of the properties dialog.

Warning: For me these emails are subtle “tasks” to learn more. Your inbox may quickly fill up. :)

Convert a string to an enumerated (enum) value

Mark H. Wagner — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 08:12:00 GMT

Convert a string to an enumerated (enum) value.

Using the Enum.Parse method, you can easily convert a string value to an enumerated value. Doing this requires the type of the enum and string value. Adding the true argument will cause the case to be ignored.

Using the following enum for this example:

private enum Aircraft
{
   Beech,
   Cessna,
   Piper
}

You can easily convert the string to an enum value like this:

Aircraft air = (Aircraft) Enum.Parse(typeof(Aircraft), "Cessna", true);

Ideally you should wrap a try-catch around the Enum.Parse statement.

String Date Validator

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:19:00 GMT

Simple string date validator.

I am a big fan of maintaining a library of simple and clean helper methods. Here is a simple and clean way to verify if a string formatted date is a valid date. This allows you to encapsulate the exception handling making it easy to use and very readable - another important coding practice.

private static bool IsDate(string sDate)
{
DateTime dt;
bool isDate = true;

    try
    {
        dt = DateTime.Parse(sDate);
    }
    catch
    {
        isDate = false;
    }

return isDate;
}

What is your (assembly's) native tongue?

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:05:00 GMT

Per an MSDN TV episode (Using Managed Resources) - to improve the performance (albeit minimal - I expect) of your assemblies, you should include the following line in your assemblyinfo.cs

[assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute("en-US")]

This defines the default language for your assembly. This allows the .NET runtime to bypass the process of looking for a satellite assembly for the “en-US” (default) language if the current culture matches the assemblies default culture. Of course, assemblies intended for other languages should define that language as the default language.

Also, if you can put your satelite assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), the Common Language Runtime (CLR) will load the assembly faster by not having to verify the cryptographic assembly signature.

Trace.axd - The more you learn, the less you know

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 15:08:00 GMT

The more you learn, the less you know.

Trying to keep up with the extensive areas of .NET and Microsoft products can easily bring you to this conclusion. Its easy for us to continually focus on all the new technologies and versions (Whidbey and the .NET Framework 2.0) only to overlook some of the low hanging fruit - at least for me it is. Remember, this is the “Simple Thoughts from a Simple Mind“ blog. ;)

One area I forgot about is the ASP.NET Trace - Trace.axd page. As you may know, ASP.NET allows you to trace the processing for a single page or for all pages. The trace output can be rendered at the end of each page. Don't forget (as I did) there is also the Trace.axd page that provides a nice list of traced pages such as this.

The web.config file needs only a small change to make this available.

Clicking on the View Details link for a page process will present you with the familiar trace detail.

Excellent source of .NET code samples

Mark H. Wagner — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 13:28:00 GMT

Mike Woodring has an excellent library of code samples. The bonus is that each of these is well documented. I recomend you take time to review these.

http://www.bearcanyon.com/dotnet/

Building a Better Busy Box (Processing… Please Wait) - Ver 1.2

Mark H. Wagner — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 10:09:00 GMT

Building a Better Busy Box - Ver 1.2
(Processing… Please Wait)

Mark Wagner
Castle Rock Software, LLC
http://blogs.crsw.com/mark

February 16, 2005

Updates

February 16, 2005 - Rewrite to use an IFRAME instead of a DIV tag.
January 7, 2005 - Fixed z-Index attribute.
November 13, 2004 - Original article

Summary: We often need to provide a user message informing the user that their request is “processing”. Like the hour-glass mouse pointer lets the Windows user know the system is busy processing their last request, I have a simple, clean, and effect solution to providing this on web pages.

BusyBox Demo
http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/samples/BusyBoxDemo/Default.aspx

Article source and sample code links
This article is located at: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/642.aspx
Source code sample at: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/files/BusyBox-1.2-Demo.zip

Technologies employed

JavaScript
HTML (ASP.NET)

Supported browsers

Internet Explorer 6
Netscape Navigator 7.1, 7.2
Firefox 1.0
No other browsers have been tested

Introduction
Anyone who has used the Internet for more than a few hours has encountered times when the “Internet” is being slow. I use the term “Internet” in jest here since it is often the term used when websites are not responding as quickly as we would like. As most of us know, the problem is more often caused by an over-worked website, one that is unable to handle its current workload. This article does not address any performance issues as that is a much larger topic for another time. However, for those well designed and well cared-for websites there are very acceptable times when displaying a “processing” message to the user is very helpful and very appropriate.

I have certainly experienced times; as I am sure you have, where after clicking a submit or search button I began to wonder if the web server was going to process my request successfully. Why shouldn’t it. I didn’t expect it to take more than a second or two. Performing functions like a search, report generation, or the processing of a large order, can often take more time than we would like. These predictably slow responding places in an application are ideal candidates for user feedback in the form of a processing message. As long as your website is not normally slow, your users will appreciate being notified of potentially long running processes.

There are a number of different approaches to accomplishing this. One of the more common methods is to navigate to an intermediate page where an animated image and/or message are presented to the user. The intermediate page then immediately initiates the process of navigating to the long-processing page. This allows the intermediate “please wait” page to be displayed to the user while the long-processing target page is crunching away. When the target page completes its long process it then begins rendering to the user’s browser, thus replacing the “please wait” message. While this technique works well when navigating from page A to page B, it does not work well when a post-back (from page A to page A) is needed. Additionally, having the benefits of things like ViewState become discarded.

My Approach
The approach I am about to cover functions just as well during a post-back as it does when navigating from page X to page Y. Moreover, there is no need (or desire) to have an intermediate processing page. If you are using a custom base page for your application; (i.e. a MasterPage), it becomes even easier to user. I have added this to my personal CastlePage class making it very easy to use at anytime.

My approach is to pre-load my busy box message in a hidden IFRAME tag on any page that will navigate (or post-back) to a potentially long running process. After all, my busy box message has a pretty small code footprint. The page will begin it’s unload process whenever the browser posts to a new page or performs a post-back. By placing JavaScript code in the onbeforeunload event of the body tag I can instantly reveal the busy box message to the user. Since this is part of the original page it will display immediately and remain visible until the new page completes its processing and begins to render in the user's browser. Best of all, this works great with post-backs too.

Click here for the complete article.

JavaScript ASP.NET Rater control (Rating control): Sneak Peek

Mark H. Wagner — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:15:00 GMT

Rater Control, Rating Control, or 5-Star Rating Control, call it what you like.

I have created a new JavaScript ASP.NET Rater control (Rating Control). The entire functionality is driven by JavaScript, but I have also created an custom .NET control to facilitate easy use in an ASP.NET web appication. I intend on writing a much more detailed article, soon I hope. For now you can see my demo page for a better look.

Technologies:
JavaScript
C#
ASP.NET

Here is a sneak peak at the Rater control in action: (Hint: use your mouse.)

Demo: http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/samples/CastleRaterDemo/

Download the demo (and control).
Download the control only.

Note: For anyone who would like to link to my Rater control, please link to this post and not my demo page. Thanks. Also, I will make the C# source code for the .NET control available soon.