Amadiere.com

Fourteen and a half crazy frog burpers

6th April 2010

Development SMTP Servers for IIS7.5 on Windows 7

Filed under: ASP.NET,C# — Tags: , , , , , — Alex Holt @ 3:43 pm

I’ve had one of them days. You know? That “simple task” that spiralled out of control and resulted in me losing half a day to it’s tricks! That task? It was sending an email from an ASP.NET (MVC2) application. Previously, I’ve always done this via setting up IIS and the SMTP server in there, but for some reason, Microsoft decided they didn’t want to include the SMTP Server in Windows 7 anymore (even ‘Ultimate’ – it might also be the case for Windows Vista). So, I had to find an alternative.

There were a few options available to me:

  • SMTP Server on Localhost: This was the obvious choice, but after trying Mercury Mail and it’s quarter of a million settings as it installed (I’m no Email Admin, so didn’t know the answer to all of them). It didn’t work and I’m not sure why. To rub salt into the would, there was no uninstall either – it proper irritated me and I gave up using it out of principal.
  • SMTP Server on Localhost that is really just a Relay. Well, sounded good – but again, it was designed by people with bigger brains than me and it failed to send to what I thought was a correctly configured IIS7.5 config pointing to my GMail account.
  • Fake Server: Something that doesn’t actually send emails, but pretends to.

The last one is the one I eventually choose and boy am I glad I did! I downloaded the excellent SMTP 4 DEV from Codeplex

  1. I don’t have 100′s of emails cluttering up my email box for starters. Win!
  2. It was so easy to set-up and it worked perfectly without a change to my code. Win!
  3. It’s free. Win!

Here is some fake code that should send an email to the localhost.

MailMessage emailMessage = new MailMessage();
string messageBody = "This is the content of the email will be awesome!";
 
emailMessage.Body = messageBody;
emailMessage.Priority = MailPriority.Normal;
emailMessage.From = new MailAddress("no-reply@amadiere.com"); // obviously, this email address doesn't exist :)
emailMessage.Subject = "The answer is 42";
emailMessage.IsBodyHtml = false;
 
SmtpClient mSmtpClient = new SmtpClient();
mSmtpClient.Host = "127.0.0.1";  // localhost
mSmtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.Network;
 
mSmtpClient.Send(emailMessage);

15th March 2010

Good Quality Image Resizing in C#

Filed under: C# — Tags: , , , — Alex Holt @ 8:40 pm

I encountered a little bit of a problem the other day with some image resizing code from within an ASP.NET MVC application that was misbehaving. The issue was just a general C# and ASP.NET one, not related to MVC or Webforms, but it was that for some reason the images were losing a significant amount of quality when resizing. I’m talking a pixel sharp 2000 x 2000 picture that when resized to 300 x 300, was woefully blurry. Initially, the code was simply using the GetThumbnailImage() method to produce it’s resizes, this turned out to be the mistake!

While GetThumbnailImage() is fine for small thumbnail images (the clue I guess, was in the name), it somewhat struggled on the larger versions. To fix the issue, I had to convert the image to a bitmap, faff about with it like that, then export it back to a Jpeg once I was done.

For future me (and anyone else this might help), here is the code I eventually settled on:

EncoderParameters encodingParameters = new EncoderParameters(1);
encodingParameters.Param[0] = new EncoderParameter(Encoder.Quality, 90L); // Set the JPG Quality percentage to 90%.
 
ImageCodecInfo jpgEncoder = GetEncoderInfo("image/jpeg");
 
// Incoming! This is the original image. This line can effectively be anything, but in this example it's coming from a stream.
var image = Image.FromStream(new System.IO.MemoryStream(Picture));
 
// Creating two blank canvas. One that the original image is placed into, the other for the resized version.
Bitmap originalImage = new Bitmap(image);
Bitmap newImage = new Bitmap(originalImage, 300, (image.Height * 300 / image.Width));  // Width of 300 & maintain aspect ratio (let it be as high as it needs to be).
 
// We then do some funky voodoo with the newImage. Changing it to a graphic to allow us to set the HighQualityBilinear property and resize nicely.
Graphics g = Graphics.FromImage(newImage);
g.InterpolationMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.InterpolationMode.HighQualityBilinear;
g.DrawImage(originalImage, 0, 0, newImage.Width, newImage.Height);
 
var streamLarge = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
newImage.Save(streamLarge, jpgEncoder, encodingParameters);
 
// This is the line that returns the picture to the relevant part of the model.
_event.Picture = streamLarge.ToArray();
 
// No need for all that drama for the thumbnail, the loss of quality isn't noticable.
var thumbnail = image.GetThumbnailImage(80, (image.Height*80/image.Width), null, new IntPtr(0));
var streamThumbnail = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
 
thumbnail.Save(streamThumbnail, jpgEncoder, encodingParameters);
 _event.ThumbnailPicture = streamThumbnail.ToArray();
 
// Good boy's tidy-up after themselves! :O
originalImage.Dispose();
newImage.Dispose();
thumbnail.Dispose();
streamLarge.Dispose();
streamThumbnail.Dispose();

9th November 2009

BEHOLD! The coming of ASP.NET 4.0!

Filed under: ASP.NET,C#,MVC — Tags: , , — Alex Holt @ 8:30 pm

‘Tis a day of reconing upon us! The mighty that hath enjoyed the fruits of our labour shall become our lesser kin. ASP.NET#3.5 is being bumped up A WHOLE HALF VERSION! When you’ve regained your breath (have a cup of tea, if it helps) – read on for a breakdown of the glory that shall shine bright in all that is sparky, shiny and new!

First, for me, the major feature has to be something that is already available: ASP.NET MVC – now part of the ‘Out Of The Box’ experience and no longer required to be a separate download (though, still will be for ASP.NET 3.5). This in itself is worthy of a good cold shower, but get this… it’s version 2! Oh yeah, sweetness itself.

MVC 2.0 isn’t actually available as a release version at the moment and is in fact just a preview version. However, well worthy of look if you are at all interested in the original MVC. If you’ve been unable to see the new features in 2.0, then I seriously do not understand how you can sleep at night. In my bid to cure your insomnia, here are a few of the highlights, though, I could go on!

  • Areas are being introduced to allow you to easily spread your code apart into logical parts. E.g. You can have an area for your User / Account management stuff, and an area for your Product Listings. This allows you to keep the MVC pattern but in segmented way. Your User Area would have a directory for Controllers, Models and Views, and your Product Area would have separate areas too.
  • DataAnnotation Validation is voodoo. A black magic that makes you sit back and go: “WTF, is that it”? It allows you to declare the requirements of a field in a single place within your application, then any time something attempts to update it, the validation must be passed.
  • Default Values are easier to declare now. 
    // something old
public ActionResult Browse(string category, [DefaultValue(1)] int page)
{
}
// something new
public ActionResult Browse(string category, int page = 1)
{
}
  • They have shortened the attribute [HttpPost] . I know, I saved the best until last! 
    // out with the old
[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Create(Product product)
{
}
// in with the new!
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(Product product)
{
}

As for the rest of ASP.NET 4.0, what can you look forward to? Well!

  • The superbly sweet… 
    <%:productDescription%>

    Did you see it? The shorthand response.write alternative which was the equals sign has a rival. But not a dark nemesis with fire-breathing tentacles, nope, a bright white halo-toting angel rival. Simply replace the equal sign with a colon and you have a HTML Encoded Response.Write alternative. Finally, what seems to be a simple solution to reduce considerably, the risk of XSS attacks.

  • URL Routing (or of course, URL Rowwting if you are from the US) in much the same way that MVC has it. If you’re familiar with MVC 1, you’ll know the awesomeness that is the friendly URLs that they can produce. With ASP.NET4, this gesture is extended to the general Webforms environment.
  • Auto-Starting Web Applications are here! No longer do you need to set up a cron job to make sure that a random visitor doesn’t have to wait for 20 seconds while your application reloads itself into memory. A few tweaks and bliss is yours (and your customers).
  • Web.config has been on a diet. It’s shredded almost all of its weight. The only things that need to appear within this now are config settings that you actually want to change from their default. Genius! 
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    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>
  • The Entity Framework has become so awesome, it’s skipped a version or two to become EF4.0, and some of the upgrades make it strong and compelling contender for your model structuring! It contains considerably less suck than the first version.

All this ‘win’ makes you nervous? How can the world not implode? That my friend, I do not know – I think it may be like the Y2K Doomsday predictions – its the .NET4 DOOM! Either way, it’s looking good in the ASP.NET world at the moment and I can’t wait for it to land on my desktop!

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