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Generate HTML e-mail body in C# using templates

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Almost a year ago, I answered a question on StackOverflow, about if there’s a better way to generate HTML e-mails in C# than using a StringBuilder and just appending strings one by one. I think that any modern piece of software today, needs to send e-mail. Whether it being password recovery e-mails, rich reports, newsletters or anything else – being able to easily see and customize the look and feel of your e-mails is vital. So, the worst way I could think of is having your HTML hidden away in some StringBuilder.Append() hell. The best solution (in my opinion) would be, if you could have plain old HTML files with parameters like <#FirstName#> so you could dynamically replace those at runtime. The MailDefinition class Luckily, there’s a class for that! If you read the comments on my answer on StackOverflow, … Continued

IISAPP equivalent in IIS 7 and beyond

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If there’s one change I hate about IIS 7 and beyond, it is the lack of the very useful IISAPP script that was present on IIS 6 installations. Run it from a command prompt, and you will see a list of all running worker processes, the process id and the application pool name the process is serving. Very useful if you need to shut down a single site. As I mentioned, that script was removed in IIS 7 and beyond. I find myself constantly running IISAPP without any luck several times a week, and I’ve decided that this is a habit that I cannot leave behind. So, to solve the problem I’ve created a small .bat file called iisapp.bat and copied it to the C:\Windows\System32 folder. The content of the iisapp.bat file is just a single line, that does exactly … Continued

Unit test for verifying references from DataAnnotation validation to the ErrorMessageResourceName value

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I love the new model validation features in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. One thing I don’t like though, is that the ErrorMessageResourceName is loosely typed. The ErrorMessageResourceType, however, is a System.Type which will be strongly typed by assigning its value using the typeof(Namespace.ResourceSetType) method. Since there’s no build-breaking reference between a resource file and the value of the ErrorMessageResourceName on all classes where you use it, I thought it would be cool to have a unit test that verifies the existence of all referenced resource keys. Remember to add a reference to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. Code /// <summary> /// Verifies that all properties that are decorated with validation data-annotations, refers to /// an existing resource. This will make sure, that missing resources are not referenced. /// </summary> [TestMethod] public void All_Properties_With_Validation_Annotations_Must_Refer_To_Existing_Resource() { Assembly assembly = Assembly.Load(new AssemblyName(“MyApp.Model.Namespace”)); var types = assembly.GetTypes().Where<Type>(t => t.IsClass && !t.IsAbstract); … Continued

Multiple SSL certificates on IIS using host headers

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In IIS SSL sites have seemed to be limited to only one site per network interface, since you (from IIS Manager) cannot specify a host header binding on the HTTPS protocol. It turns out, that it is only a limitation in the UI. So to have e.g. two sites with their own dedicated SSL certificate we need to add a host header binding on port 443 from either appcmd, managed code or by editing the applicationHosts.config file. I like managed code the most, so I’ve written a small method in C# that does the trick. You need to have two SSL certificates named www.ssl1.com and www.ssl2.com installed on the machine. I just created a self signed certificate for both of them using the IIS Manager. using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates; using Microsoft.Web.Administration; namespace IisSsl { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { … Continued

ASP.NET MVC View Page Editor in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 won’t recognize HTML tags

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I love the new IntelliSense dialog in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, that ScottGu has blogged about. But when editing an ASP.NET MVC View Page in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, you end up fighting the IntelliSense. That is because IntelliSense and the HTML Editor doesn’t recognize *any* HTML tags. Trying to add a simple paragraph tag in HTML suggests a panel (code snippet). When you finish the P tag, by typing >, the result is this: Pretty annoying to fight with IntelliSense when you want to code! I thought you might be able to fix this, by deleting all the new ASP.NET specific code snippets in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Web\Snippets\HTML\1033\ASP.NET” folder. This actually works. Now you can actually see the ASP.NET MVC code snippets, that was hidden in the masses of the ASP.NET ones. But it still … Continued

Search Twitter from C# using LINQ to XML

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In some applications, it could be cool to have a feature that enabled the user to quickly get a glimpse of what people are saying on Twitter about the user or their product, service, company etc. For instance, a service like GetSatisfaction.com has a feature just like that. They call it Overheard, and this is what it looks like: There’s nothing like Twitter to give you feedback. I think MediaTemple felt the effect of unhappy customers on Twitter when their servers broke down, and stayed there for more than two days! Anyway. I wanted to search from C#, and get back a DataTable. Here’s how it’s done: /// <summary> /// Searches Twitter for the specified query. /// </summary> /// <param name=”query”>The query.</param> /// <returns>Returns the search results as a DataTable</returns> public DataTable Search(string query) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); … Continued

Migrate web.config to support the IIS 7 Integrated Pipeline

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Whenever you deploy a website to IIS 7 that is not compliant with the IIS 7 integrated pipeline, you will get an error like this one: Not the great error message you get. It actually gives you the solution right away: Migrate Web.config to support the integrated pipeline. To do that, start a command prompt, and execute: %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd migrate config “test/” After doing this, our Web.config is changed to support the IIS 7 integrated pipeline and we can see the website. The Integrated Programming model in IIS 7 IIS 7 comes with a bunch of improvements for developers. You can do a whole lot of exciting things even from web.config, but also from code. To take advantage of the powerful integrated programming model, you need to set your application pool to use the Integrated pipeline mode. There’s no limit to … Continued

Automatically translate Global and Local Resource (resx) files

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Yesterday, I blogged about how you can use Google Translate to translate a string in C#. To make it more useful than just a simple translator, and because I need to translate some Global Resource files for an E-commerce website that I’m working on, I wanted to create a small Windows Application in C# that could read a Global Resource file (.resx) and translate it into a selected language using the method for translating a word in C# that i blogged about yesterday. This is how it looks so far. You simply select the resource file you want to translate. Select the current language of the resource file in the middle box, and select the language you want to translate it to in the last box. Click Translate at it should work. The new resource file will be saved in … Continued

Translate text in C#, using Google Translate

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*** This post is no longer up-to-date. Take a look at my new post, revisiting how to tranlate text in C# using Google Translate *** Sometimes, it would be great to be able to translate a text from e.g. English to Danish directly from C#. This could be useful when you want to translate a Resource file into another language. Google Translate is awesome. There’s also Windows Live Translator, but Microsoft are far behind Google (also) in this game. Code: using System; using System.Net; using System.Text; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; namespace Utilities { public static class Translator { /// <summary> /// Translates the text. /// </summary> /// <param name=”input”>The input.</param> /// <param name=”languagePair”>The language pair.</param> /// <returns></returns> public static string TranslateText(string input, string languagePair) { return TranslateText(input, languagePair, System.Text.Encoding.UTF7); } /// <summary> /// Translate Text using Google Translate /// </summary> /// <param … Continued

C# TwitPic API client

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I’ve spent some time lately, playing around with the Twitter API. And along with that belongs the TwitPic’s API. I’m using Twitter a lot, to stay in touch with tech news, other developers and just for fun. But it’s getting more and more used for a lot of different things, and I needed it to integrate with an E-commerce platform I’m developing. The code for post a picture to TwitPic looks like this: /// <summary> /// URL for the TwitPic API’s upload method /// </summary> private const string TWITPIC_UPLADO_API_URL = “http://twitpic.com/api/upload”; /// <summary> /// URL for the TwitPic API’s upload and post method /// </summary> private const string TWITPIC_UPLOAD_AND_POST_API_URL = “http://twitpic.com/api/uploadAndPost”; /// <summary> /// Uploads the photo and sends a new Tweet /// </summary> /// <param name=”binaryImageData”>The binary image data.</param> /// <param name=”tweetMessage”>The tweet message.</param> /// <param name=”filename”>The filename.</param> /// … Continued