April 2006 - Posts
I've explained previously how I love Google. In the meanwhile I've read an article how great Google has done financially, but also how they aren't always as honest in their quest for making all information available to everyone. In China they block information that's not approved by the government, and they refused to hand over information about people looking for some of the more nasty kinds of *** on the internet.
But who cares? We blindly follow Google in their quest to take over the world. All Linux/Unix fans out there should love Google, as they're on their way to buy-out Microsoft in the future! And another step in that direction is Google Calendar, which has now been made public. So go ahead, get a calendar at google.com/calendar and see how beautiful they can make your life! ;-)
It features sharing of your calendar with multiple options, including holidays of one or more countries, including christian holidays. Notifications of events via mail and sms, unfortunatly the latter not in The Netherlands. And of course everything is handled on the Ajaxian way that made Google so popular with me!
At my current project we've been working with the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project since some weeks. Source Safe kept bugging us by checking in everything in the web-folder(s), so we decided to use the WebApp Project template. In our situation the web application was used for our webservice(s). Our Windows application used the webservices to retrieve data. As I've epxlained here you can setup multiple startup projects, so it becomes really easy to debug your webservice, and you don't need to attach your debugger to the webserver every time.
Unfortunatly, the WebApp Project template did not have the option available to not start up a browser once you hit the F5 button, like the normal VS2005 website has. So I emailed Scott Guthrie, he forwarded the mail to the team working on the template and we got their word that they'd include it into the final.
Although it's not final, the release candidate is here and as promised, the option is included! Way to go!
Download the installer here, and you might need the VS2005 2005 upgrade first, which enables support for the web project.
Some things are so simple, you'd expect everyone to know these things and use them wisely. Unfortunatly, this isn't always the case, even when it concerns me! ;-)
Take for example mailing in .NET, using your localhost smtp server. How difficult can this be? You get an error that the server is unable to relay your mail, you go to IIS and search in the smtp server properties for relaying, set it up and go. Until at some point, on a server I was using at home, it still would not work, due to some security settings. So to make sure my relaying was not the problem, I threw relaying open for everyone. Resulting in a mail from my ISP that they banned me from using their smtp server, because my server was being used by spammers. The mail I got was sent a few hours before I looked at it. So I wanted to check my mail-queue with Windows Explorer. There were so many files in that directory, that Windows could not handle it and locked up. From that moment on, I've been pretty carefull with my relay settings ;-)
I was thinking about this story when I read Peter van Ooijen his last blog entry, where he explains how to use mail and setup your server for relaying mail. I'll join Peter in the statement he ends his blog with; Use with care!