.net SMTP – Sending An Email Message With A Display Name

May 29, 2013 chrisbittingasp.net, email, mail, smtp, vb.netLeave a comment

If you’ve ever used .net to send email messages (and I hope you have!) you may have wanted to send the message from or to not only an address, but also include a name. The ‘display name’ is the name that appears in many email clients instead of the address (think ‘Chris Bitting’ instead of ‘cbitting@something.com’). .Net honors the email standard of “Display Name <email@domain.com>”.

Below is a quick example on how this looks in vb.net:

Dim mail As New System.Net.Mail.MailMessage("""Some Body"" <person@company.com>", """A Different Person"" <person2@company2.com>", "Subject", "Body")

Below is a full example on an email function (include Imports System.Net.Mail): Continue reading “.net SMTP – Sending An Email Message With A Display Name” →

IIS / WordPress – Blocking User Agents using Rewrite Rules

May 28, 2013 chrisbittingagent, block, feedburner, iis, php, security, web.config, wordpressLeave a comment

If you run WordPress on Windows (and who doesn’t?) and have the need to block specific user agents (bots, crawlers, browsers) below is a decent way I’ve found that uses rewriting rules and works along side the needed WordPress rules:

Adding this rule to your web.config will block the request from the specified agent(s):

 <rule name="RequestBlockingRule1" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url=".*" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{HTTP_USER_AGENT}" pattern="agent1|agent2|agent3" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="CustomResponse" statusCode="403"
             statusReason="Forbidden: Access is denied."
             statusDescription="You do not have permission to view this page." />
        </rule>

Continue reading “IIS / WordPress – Blocking User Agents using Rewrite Rules” →

IIS 8 ASP.Net Error “configuration section cannot be used…”

April 11, 2013 chrisbitting.net, asp.net, config, error, iis, windowsLeave a comment

When working with IIS 8 (or even 7 or 7.5), you may have run across this little gem / error: “This configuration section cannot be used at this path”

HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error
The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Module / Handler IIS Web Core

Notification BeginRequest
Handler Not yet determined

You’ll want to open the applicationhost.config located in: C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config

And now find the lines like this:

<section name="handlers" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />
<section name="modules" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />

And change the Deny to Allow, like this:

<section name="handlers" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />
<section name="modules" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />

Save the file, and you should be good!

Disable ‘Compatibility Mode’ in Internet Explorer (IE) 8 / 9

March 7, 2013September 17, 2014 chrisbittingc#, compatibility mode, ie, internet explorer, metaLeave a comment

compatibilty-mode Over the past few months you put tons of time and effort into your awesome new site. However, your roll it live and find out that someone accidentally has Compatibility Mode mode in IE turned on. Now your scripts don’t function exactly how you imagined and your layout is acting funky. There are some Meta tags that apparently take care of this if you add them to your page (<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=edge,chrome=1″ />) but personally I haven’t had great success with these. Below is the way I found best in .net to disable and turn off Compatibility Mode in IE:

On your page (preferably master page in web forms or mvc) add this line:

<% Response.AddHeader(“X-UA-Compatible”, “IE=edge,chrome=1”); %>

In my case I’m adding it below the <%@ Master Language=”C#” … line before the start of content (doctype).

Update: You can also easily add the header in IIS (no need to update your code) by going to ‘http response headers’ and choosing ‘add’:

Twilio SMS Messages In Non-web .net Application with Twilio REST API (c#)

February 28, 2013 chrisbittingapi, c#, proxy, rest, sms, twilio, webrequestLeave a comment

Twilio is a great SMS (text message) gateway to use for sending and receiving SMS messages. The process is super simple and flexible to get started using (the Twilio REST API helper library is great). However, in my case, I wanted to access the API through a “windows form” application, but the API needs a little something extra to get this to function. In my experience, a proxy. Below are the steps from start to finish to retrieve messages from your Twilio account: Continue reading “Twilio SMS Messages In Non-web .net Application with Twilio REST API (c#)” →

Update – More Details: Retrieving Email using Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0 (c#)

February 26, 2013 chrisbittingapi, asp.net, c#, exchange, html, inbox, web service4 Comments

So maybe you have started to use the Exchange Web Services Managed API to get email from inboxes and wanted to get a few additional details. Below are two of the most popular issues: Continue reading “Update – More Details: Retrieving Email using Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0 (c#)” →

Retrieving and Sending Email using Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0 (c#)

February 21, 2013February 27, 2013 chrisbittingasp.net, c#, email, exchange, web services7 Comments

If you haven’t already had the need, I’m sure you will at some point, to either retrieve email or send email through Exchange (not just relay or connect to Outlook) using .net. Since Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0 this task has become much more efficient No more clunky 2.0 type web service references etc. Below is a complete chuck of code with a few samples. One sample function sends an email, the other retrieves email messages from an inbox with the option of filters.

Continue reading “Retrieving and Sending Email using Exchange Web Services Managed API 2.0 (c#)” →

Display Weather Alerts From NOAA Using Atom (WPF Example)

February 8, 2013 chrisbittingatom, c#, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, NOAA, rss, Syndication, wpf, xaml2 Comments

So since there is this impending storm (blizzard, snow storm, snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, snowzilla) “Nemo” hitting us here on the East coast within a few hours, I figured a good topic might be on weather alert data. There is a bunch of data available from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) on their site. Data is available in several categories, including Forecasts, Watch/warnings, Storm Prediction Center Forecast Products, etc. In my very quick example I’m going to pick the “Watch / Warning” data for my region and display this using WPF for an easy visualization. Continue reading “Display Weather Alerts From NOAA Using Atom (WPF Example)” →

c# DataTable Copy / Filter / Sort & Clone

January 22, 2013 chrisbittingado, c#, clone, copy, data, datatable, importrow, sqlLeave a comment

If you’re like me (I hope not too much like me) you probably find yourself using DataTables to hold lots of data for fast, flexible in memory usage. I get asked often, “how can I copy a DataTable?” or even more often, “how can I copy a DataTable, but change the sort or modify the rows”. Look no further. Below you’ll find my thoughts:

Example one (a simple copy with a sort difference):

    //datatable
    var table = new DataTable();

    //get some data
    using (var conn = new SqlConnection(yourSqlConn))
        {
            var comm = new SqlCommand(@"select * from someTable order by someColumn", conn);
            comm.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
            conn.Open();
            var data = comm.ExecuteReader();
            table.Load(data);
        }

    //bind to some control (repeater)
    rptFirstList.DataSource = table;
    rptFirstList.DataBind();

    //second table
    var secondTable = new DataTable();
    secondTable = table.Copy();
    secondTable.DefaultView.Sort = "someOtherColumn";

    //bind second
    rptSecondList.DataSource = secondTable;
    rptSecondList.DataBind();

Example two (creating a copy of the table but allowing a filter, sort or other criteria):

    //datatable
    var table = new DataTable();

    //get some data
    using (var conn = new SqlConnection(yourSqlConn))
        {
            var comm = new SqlCommand(@"select * from someTable order by someColumn", conn);
            comm.CommandType = CommandType.Text;
            conn.Open();
            var data = comm.ExecuteReader();
            table.Load(data);
        }

    //bind to some control (repeater)
    rptFirstList.DataSource = table;
    rptFirstList.DataBind();

    //second table
    var secondTable = new DataTable();

    //clone to get columns - NO data is copied
    secondTable = table.Clone();
    //loop through rows and import based on filter
    foreach (DataRow dr in table.Select("someColumn = 'value'","someColumnToSort")) {

    secondTable.ImportRow(dr);

    }

    //bind second
    rptSecondList.DataSource = secondTable;
    rptSecondList.DataBind();

Parsing Html content using Html Agility Pack, Cookies & Proxy

January 14, 2013 chrisbitting.net, cookie, htmlagilitypack, parse, proxy, screenscrape, vb.netLeave a comment

If you’ve ever needed to parse (screen scrape?) some remote html, you may have wanted to pull info from a page that only renders content to a browser. The below example shows how to grab some content from a web page (using a web request) but also incorporates using cookies and a proxy to help and the Html Agility Pack to parse the returned html (allowing you to get a specific element):

Imports System.Net
Imports System.Web

Public Class Form1

    Public cookies As New CookieContainer

    Private Sub Button1_Click(sender As System.Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

        'create a web request
        Dim wreq As HttpWebRequest = WebRequest.Create("http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AMZN.OQ")

        'set the agent to mimic a recent browser
        wreq.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5"

        'how you're getting the page
        wreq.Method = "get"

        'create a proxy
        Dim prox As IWebProxy = wreq.Proxy

        'set the proxy cred
        prox.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials

        'create the html doc & web
        Dim document As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument
        Dim web As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlWeb

        'needs to use cookies
        web.UseCookies = True

        'set the cookie request
        wreq.CookieContainer = cookies

        'start a response
        Dim res As HttpWebResponse = wreq.GetResponse()

        'get a stream from the response
        document.Load(res.GetResponseStream, True)

        'get some data from the page. 
        'in the below example, i'm looling for a div with the class 'sectionQuoteDetail' and getting the content of the second span inside
        Dim strCurrentQuote = document.DocumentNode.SelectSingleNode("//div[@class='sectionQuoteDetail']//span[2]")

        MsgBox(strCurrentQuote.InnerText)

    End Sub

End Class

As a side note, the use of the proxy code above also solves the frequent HttpWebRequest WebException “The remote server returned an error: (407) Proxy Authentication Required” error.