I've recently been trying to send emails using ASP.NET 2.0 on a web server which uses MailEnable. MailEnable had relaying locked down to avoid opening the server up to spammers, but I wasn't able to authenticate with MailEnable to relay emails to external domains.

I tested my code was working by temporarily checking the "Allow relay for local sender addresses" checkbox in the SMTP properties on MailEnable and my email was relayed successfully. However as soon as I uncheck this option I get this error message in the SMTP W3C logs:

503+This+mail+server+requires+authentication+when+attempting+to+send+to+a+non-local+e-mail+address.+Please+check+your+mail+client+settings+or+contact+your+administrator+to+verify+that+the+domain+or+address+is+defined+for+this+server.

I eventually got it working. I changed the authentication type from "MailEnable integrated authentication" to "Authenticate against the following username/password." then I supplied a username and password to MailEnable.
After restarting the SMTP service in MailEnable. I was able to relay emails using the following C# ASP.NET 2.0 code snippet...


using System.Net.Mail;

MailAddress source = new MailAddress("admin@localdomain.com", "Server");
MailAddress recipient = new MailAddress("external@mail.com", "External");

MailMessage enquiryMail = new MailMessage(source, recipient);
enquiryMail.Subject = "Test";
enquiryMail.Body = "Test content";
enquiryMail.IsBodyHtml = true;

SmtpClient smtpServer = new SmtpClient("mail.localdomain.com");
smtpServer.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username", "password", "localdomain.com");
smtpServer.Send(enquiryMail);

As an ASP.NET web developer, I think it's important to understand and know how to configure Microsoft's web server, Internet Information Services (IIS). Depending on the organisation you work for you may or may not get the opportunity to tinker with IIS, but this shouldn't stop you from learning the basics.

You could go out and buy a book on configuring IIS and then install IIS on your computer to practise what you've read, but thanks to the guys at Trainsignal.com who have kindly sent me some of their training videos, I've discovered a much easier way of learning.

Train Signal provides video training courses for Microsoft, Cisco and CompTIA certifications, including CCNA, A+, Network+.
I'll also be reviewing the Cisco CCNA training videos here soon.

Train Signal's IIS Web Server video training covers both IIS 5 and IIS6, and features topics including installing IIS, creating test websites, hosting more than one website using host headers, adding security, setting up an FTP server, and web server optimisation.

The course is taught by Scott Skinger, President and founder of Train Signal. Scott has many years of experience in the IT field, holds various IT certifications and is a competent instructor. The videos are easy to follow and Scott's narration is second to none.

The series of videos are backed up with a written guide in the form of the lab book, which comes as a printable PDF on the CD ROM, this goes through the same steps featured in the videos and includes network diagrams like the one above to help you set-up your own lab.

If you want to get up to speed on a particular Microsoft product, obtain an IT certification or you don't like reading IT text books then I definitely recommend you give these training videos a try.

Course Contents in full:

Introduction
Lab Setup
Setting up the lab
Computer 1
Computer 2
Computer 3
Lab
Scenario
Installing IIS on Windows 2000 Server
Creating an HTML file
Hosting Ben & Brady's site
Configure DNS so Internet users can find your website
Testing the website from the client
Lab
Scenario
Creating a test website using an HTML file
Creating an additional website on the web server
Creating host headers
Configuring DNS for the second website
Test and view website from client
Assigning site operators
Adding security to a website
Test and view the website from a client
Lab
Scenario
Downloading and installing service packs and hot fixes
Setting NTFS permissions
Disabling Netbios over TCP/IP
Download and run The IIS lockdown tool from Microsoft
Enable and view logging

I was kindly sent a uCertify PrepKit for review back in December last year for the Microsoft C# .NET 2.0 Web-based Client Development exam (70-528). I'm looking to take the Microsoft MCTS .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications certification this year, and needed an exam simulator and part of my study.

I've been so busy lately its been difficult to find the time to sit down and put the exam simulator through its paces. Anyhow I've spent a good few hours testing my .NET knowledge with this PrepKit to allow me to confidently evaluate it.

The PrepKit features a bunch of questions that closely follow the style of questions featured in the Microsoft exam, obviously the PrepKit does not contain real exam questions, but uCertify claim they are "realistic", and they are supposed to get you used to the kind of questions you should expect to see when you come to take the real exam.

The tests in the PrepKit contain between 15 and 40 questions each and you’re given 120 minutes to complete each one, but I found that choosing a shorter time and reducing the amount of questions I needed to answer allowed me to spend more time using the PrepKit, because I don’t often have 2 hours of uninterrupted revision time.

There are two different modes to choose from before starting a test. Learn mode and Test mode, Learn mode allows you to get feedback on the current answer immediately whereas in Test mode you can only review the answers at the end of the practice test.

When you complete a test you can review the questions and go back and look at any questions you may have answered incorrectly. You can also choose to re-take just the questions you got wrong. When you re-take the test the multiple choice answers change order to keep you on your toes!
During a test you can pause the timer to take a call, make a coffee etc, tag, print, review and bookmark questions.

Every test you take with the PrepKit gets recorded in the Test History section, from here you can go back and review all the practice tests you've taken, review all the questions you got wrong, re-do the whole tests or re-do only the questions you got wrong.

Custom tests can also be created to turn your weaknesses, based on your test history or certain topics into your strengths.

Besides the practice tests the PrepKit contains study notes, quizzes and tips and flash cards to help assist you in understanding the topic.

I recently downloaded Microsoft's new Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, which is a cut-down free version of Visual Studio aimed specifically at ASP.NET web developers. It supersedes the last version (VWD 2005) and adds new functionality.

I didn't remove the old version before installing, and in doing so noticed, and was able to verify (with screen shots below) that support for building mobile websites has been removed in the latest version, at least that's what appears to have happened!

Visual Web Developer 2005 - Add new item dialog box

Visual Web Developer 2008 - Add new item dialog box

Using the DbProviderFactories class in ADO.NET you can retrieve a list of available database factories using the GetFactoryClasses method. This can be useful if you host your ASP.NET site on a shared server and don't have access to the web server and machine.config file.

The output of the GetFactoryClasses method is a DataTable of available factory classes, these are the factory classes that the .NET runtime will have access to.

Here's the kind of output you'll get...

Name	Description	InvariantName	AssemblyQualifiedName
Odbc Data Provider	.Net Framework Data Provider for Odbc	System.Data.Odbc	System.Data.Odbc.OdbcFactory, System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
OleDb Data Provider	.Net Framework Data Provider for OleDb	System.Data.OleDb	System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory, System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
OracleClient Data Provider	.Net Framework Data Provider for Oracle	System.Data.OracleClient	System.Data.OracleClient.OracleClientFactory, System.Data.OracleClient, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089
SqlClient Data Provider	.Net Framework Data Provider for SqlServer	System.Data.SqlClient	System.Data.SqlClient.SqlClientFactory, System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089

Here's the code you'll need in your code behind file.

DataTable providersList = null;
providersList = System.Data.Common.DbProviderFactories.GetFactoryClasses();
GridView providerGridView = new GridView();
providerGridView.DataSource = providersList;
providerGridView.DataBind();
form1.Controls.Add(providerGridView);

I've pretty much finished migrating my personal website from classic ASP to ASP.NET 2.0. In the end I decided to keep certain pages using ASP (Active Server Pages) technology (more on that in a moment), the majority of the pages however have been migrated.

Minimise Page Rank Loss

While I wanted to bring my site up-to-date I also didn't want to lose too much Google Page Rank in the process, and make people's bookmarks and RSS blog subscriptions stop functioning. The reason the pages have to change URLs is that ASP.NET pages use the extension .aspx, compared to ASP's .asp 3-digit extension. So my portfolio.asp page for example has become portfolio.aspx.

Analysing what can be Migrated

My blog area uses Google's Blogger as a CMS, so this area hasn't had to change, although prior to using Blogger I had previously built my own blog engine and this has remained as is.

The most popular part of my site is my Cisco CCNA section. Apart from the new menu page, the other pages have half-decent Page Rank and a few pages also have DMOZ entries, so those have had to remain ASP too.

Using 301 Permanent Redirects

All the other pages however have been migrated. When you now visit those old pages (from SERPS or old links) you'll get HTTP 301 redirected to the new ASP.NET pages. Because I'm on a shared server with no access to IIS (Internet Information Server), I essentially had to hard-code ASP 301 redirects on all the ASP pages that have moved, redirecting users to the new versions.

Update Robots.txt

The next step in the process was to include those old ASP pages in my robots.txt file and log-in to the Google Webmaster console to expedite the removal of those old pages from the Google index using the URL Removal tool. If you haven't already accessed Webmaster tools I highly recommend you log-in and verify your site.

Spidering as a Final Check

Next, I made sure all navigation menus and links to the old pages under my control were pointing to the new versions. This meant updating my Blogger template and republishing, updating my old ASP navigation include files and crawling my site using XENU link sleuth to check for any I had missed.

Conclusion

Moving my content over to ASP.NET has been fairly straight forward due to the small number of pages, my Tools and Portfolio pages display data stored in XML files, so it was just a case of using XmlDataSource controls to pull the information onto the pages. My homepage picks up the latest entries in my Blogger Atom feed using XSLT, and my contact form uses basic ASP.NET form and validation controls.

Increased Functionality

While migrating my content I thought I'd use the caching feature built-in to ASP.NET to allow me to display my latest ma.gnolia bookmarks on my site, so I ended-up creating a Bookmarks page, which fetches my ma.gnolia lite RSS bookmarks XML file, either from ma.gnolia.com or my cache. The cache doesn't hold my data for as long as I stipulate, but I'm assuming this is because I'm on a shared server and the cache is dropping it to free resources.

I've been busy recently migrated my homepage (and several others) from classic ASP to ASP.NET. My homepage displays the latest 5 posts with a summary and a link to the full blog post.
I eventually found a tutorial using XSLT explaining how to achieve this after discovering that XmlDataSource XPATH doesn't support namespaces!
I've tinkered with the XSLT that Arnaud Weil posted in his blog to achieve the following objectives:

1. Limit the amount of posts returned by the transformation.
2. Show a summary of the post.
3. Show a summary that tries hard not to cut words in half when generating a snippet.
4. Produce XHTML valid code.

Here's the source of my XSLT...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<!--<xsl:output method="html"/>-->
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/atom:feed">
<div id="FeedSnippets">
<xsl:apply-templates select="atom:entry" />
</div>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="atom:entry" name="feed">
<xsl:if test="position()&lt;6">
<h4><xsl:value-of select="atom:title"/></h4>
<p>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="string-length(substring-before(atom:summary,'. ')) &gt; 0">
<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(atom:summary,'. ')" />...<br />
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="string-length(substring-before(atom:summary,'.')) &gt; 0">
<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(atom:summary,'.')" />...<br />
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="substring(atom:summary,0,200)" />...<br />
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
<strong>Read full post: </strong><a href="{atom:link[@rel='alternate']/@href}"><xsl:value-of select="atom:title"/></a></p>
<hr />
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I've been using Visual Studio 2005 on a recent project and was surprised that even though it is supposed to feature lots of web accessiblity tools and options, they don't seem to be turned on by default. I'll bring you an example to back this up.
I created a new ASP.NET page, essentially it was a simple form, which when submitted sent an email; similar to a contact form if you like. The form was built within an HTML table, with ASP:Label controls to hold the textbox definitions.
On viewing the page in a browser and examining the source code, I noticed that the ASP:Label controls are converted to HTML <span> tags, which is a little bizarre. After a little research I found that if you use the AssociatedControlID property of the ASP:Label to link to the related textbox the HTML source code produced now uses an HTML <label> tag.
I also figured out that using the ToolTip property of the ASP:Label control renders as the title property of the HTML label tag.

So the following ASP.NET source code:

<asp:Label ID="LblDayMovedOut" runat="server" ToolTip="Day Moved Out" AssociatedControlID="DayMovedOut">
<asp:DropDownList ID="DayMovedOut" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList>
</asp:Label>
<asp:Label ID="LblMonthMovedOut" runat="server" ToolTip="Month Moved Out" AssociatedControlID="MonthMovedOut">
<asp:DropDownList ID="MonthMovedOut" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList>
</asp:Label>
<asp:Label ID="LblYearMovedOut" runat="server" ToolTip="Year Moved Out" AssociatedControlID="YearMovedOut">
<asp:DropDownList ID="YearMovedOut" runat="server"></asp:DropDownList>
</asp:Label>

Would render the following bloated, but accessible HTML:

<label for="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_DayMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_LblDayMovedOut" title="Day Moved Out">
<select name="ctl00$ContentPLaceHolder$DayMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_DayMovedOut">
</select>
</label>
<label for="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_MonthMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_LblMonthMovedOut" title="Month Moved Out">
<select name="ctl00$ContentPLaceHolder$MonthMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_MonthMovedOut">
</select>
</label>
<label for="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_YearMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_LblYearMovedOut" title="Year Moved Out">
<select name="ctl00$ContentPLaceHolder$YearMovedOut" id="ctl00_ContentPLaceHolder_YearMovedOut">
</select>
</label>