Test Email Delivery Methods in web.config Using ASP.net

Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 January 2013 11:18 Written by David Bauernschmidt Tuesday, 8 January 2013 12:00

Among the most common items in a web site is the implementation of email.  There are many ways of implementing email from a web site.  You can use a multitude of technologies to accomplish this.  This article is not to discuss different methods but to look at one method which is asp.net.  You could just set the settings (server, login, password, etc) in code and use the standard SMTP code that so many sites put together, however; I have found this to be cumbersome when you are deploying the site to production.  Furthermore; after you publish to production any further testing will mingle the production emails among the testing emails.  So what can you do to make this an easier transition?  If you are familiar with VS 2012 transformation then you can see where I am going.  If not then be prepared to learn something new today.

How Do I Check That a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is Available?

Last Updated on Thursday, 29 November 2012 08:29 Written by David Bauernschmidt Saturday, 1 December 2012 12:00

The #1 way to speed up your website is to minimize HTTP requests, however; inevitably you will make request for images, audio, video, code, and other content. Whenever; you can off load some of the content to other domains or to other servers your site will always load faster. However; there will be times when those ‘other servers’ will be down. Whether it is just for a moment or for a longer period of time, you do not want your site to be at the mercy of those servers. What can you do? (Glad you asked). You can have the best of both worlds. Why not check to see if the ‘other’ server is available. If it is then use their servers to deliver your content. If not then just load your own content from your site. It is not that hard to do and takes about 3 more lines of code. You can use this for anything in particular. Just find the piece of code to check for.

I am giving you this example of the jQuery library and any library will do just replace the code with the syntax for their library.

How to Allow Access to Anonymous Users in Your ASP Application

Last Updated on Sunday, 11 November 2012 04:25 Written by Rodolfo Hernandez Wednesday, 14 November 2012 12:00

ASP application that requires authentication prevents anonymous or non authenticated users from accessing any page without proper authentication. This is a great feature, however if you have a page or pages within your asp application that you want to display to non authenticated users you won’t be able because of ASP Authentication restrictions. In this article I will give you a step by step guide on How to Allow/Deny access to Anonymous users in your ASP Application

Note: For the purposes of this guide, I will grant access to non authenticated to the ‘credits’ page of my ASP application.

1. Open the web.config file of your ASP application.

How to Bin Deploy ASP.NET Assemblies on Shared Servers

Last Updated on Tuesday, 6 November 2012 08:29 Written by Abner Myloth Friday, 9 November 2012 12:00

On ASP.NET platform it is quite common to use 3rd party assemblies like MVC, MS chart controls to add features accessible from your code which are not present in the .NET framework by default.

In your development machine, you do this by installing the required assembly server-wide. Assemblies get installed in Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and all you need to do is to reference that in web.config file.

However, it may not be possible to install all these 3rd party assemblies in a shared server as different users might be using different versions of the same assembly.

How to Publish Your ASP Application Using FTP Method in Visual Studio

Last Updated on Saturday, 29 September 2012 01:50 Written by Rodolfo Hernandez Sunday, 30 September 2012 12:00

On a previous post, we showed you how to publish your application with Web Deploy. However some of our users were experiencing issues with Web Deploy and were looking for an alternative way to publish their applications. In this article, I will give you a step by step guide on how to publish your ASP Application using FTP Method in Visual Studio

1. First, create a virtual directory. This is where your application will be installed. If you don’t know how to create one, please read this article