rohancragg's blog

Migrating legacy email content to Windows Live Mail using Outlook Connector

rohancragg — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 17:27:00 GMT

In a recent Hanselminutes podcast show "Moving your email into the Cloud" Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin agreed to do some testing and evaluate the relative merits of Google Apps and Windows Live Custom Domains for email hosting (amongst other things).

In a supporting post on Scott's blog I commented that while Carl Franklin had now abandoned the idea of using Live Custom Domains to host his email (via his own domain name) because we could not find a good way to migrate his legacy emails into his Live Mail account; I felt that there was not neccesarily any good reason to have given up on it.

By using the Outlook Connector it is possible to view both POP3 accounts and Live Hotmail accounts in the same environment and simply drag emails between them.

I know this because (like this guy) I've been doing something similar for years now. Whenever I get an email in Yahoo that I want to be able to access from anywhere, I copy it to a folder in Hotmail (inside of Outlook). Why not just leave it on the POP3 server? well, if I moved it into a folder other than the inbox then I've not found a way to have Outlook download files from anything other than the default inbox folder.

With Hotmail the technology that made this possible was a (presumably) proprietary HTTP (WebDAV?) synchronisation method (because I personally have not seen any other email providers using anything other than POP3). This beauty of this was that it allowed me to manage sub-folders inside of my email account and to be able to see those online (via the web email client interface) as well as 'offline' in Outlook. This was never a very well publicised feature (and Microsoft probably decided that they didn't really want people using it because at one point they threatened to disable it - although it never actually stopped working). It has now been superceded by the Outlook Connector which does pretty much exactly the same thing but also synchronises Contacts to some extent (and Calendar in the paid-for version only).

[I've since Google'd on this and found some useful background info from Omar Shahine]

Using .config files with NUnit and TestDriven.NET

rohancragg — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 21:12:52 GMT

I just emailed Jamie Cansdale at TestDriven.NET but in the meantime, this might come in useful to someone out there using TestDriven.NET...

As discussed in the FAQ you can use access appSettings values from a .config file.

I discovered a way of making this just a little bit easier to manage:

Add an App.Config file to your Class Library root folder along with all your tests, and rename it to match the name of the .dll of the unit test class library (e.g. MyProject.Tests.dll.config)
Add your config settings (i.e. appSettings and so on) in the normal way

It this point, whentrying to run a test, TestDriven (or possibly NUnit itself?) will not be able to findyour config settings because the config file should really have beenplaced in the bin folder but we'd then need to manage 2 copies (one foreach of the Release and Debug folders), and anyway, it's easier for you to seeand manage the config file if it's in the project root folder along with all your other classes ratherthan having to move it to the bin folder (because we'd then have tomess about doing 'show all files' and 'include in project')

To get round this problem without having to move the config file:

Add a pre-build command to the unit test project:
(i.e. under the Project Properties dialog (Build Events | Pre-Build Command Line))
enter the following command:
xcopy $(ProjectDir)$(TargetFileName).config /YR

this will copy the [tests.dll].config file to the (Release or Debug) bin folder

Assumptions:

This advice applies to VS2003, it is probably very similar for VS2005but I've not tried it (in fact, if I remember correctly, VS2005 has amuch more intuitive method for copying files into the bin directory atbuild time which won't need an xcopy command...)
Your unit tests reside in their own Class Library project

UPDATE: Jamie Cansdale has also now posted on this topic

UK political rant

rohancragg — Mon, 09 May 2005 17:03:27 GMT

Fed up of having to vote against the policies you hate most (tactical voting) rather than voting for the party or policies you really wanted to vote for?...

I wish I had known sooner about The Guardian's campaign as I would certainly have liked to have worn a peg on my nose while giving Tony my little 'X': http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1479344,00.html

So, for what it's worth, I decided to back the campaign for reform to the voting system in the UK. You can do the same if you so choose: http://www.makemyvotecount.org.uk

Subverting Tortoises

rohancragg — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 21:49:47 GMT

The other day I was looking again at where the excellent FlexWiki project has been progressing and I decided I'd like to download the sourcecode, only to realise I'd need a CVS client to access the source-control database. I promptly downloaded TortoiseCVS and was stunned to discover how easy it was to use. It got me thinking that I might as well start running a CVS locally on my machine for source-control.

I then naturally revisited the idea of using Subversion instead as I had read many times how it was "a compelling replacement for CVS" . It so happens that I decided to just start off with TortoiseSVN (a client app for Subversion) with the aim of seeing how that works and it turns out that it has an amazingly handy feature whereby you can use TortoiseSVN to setup and run a source-control repository locally. TortoiseSVN then treats that location on your hard drive exactly as if it were a Subversion server proper.

With this proliferation of Tortoises in my life I decided to hark back to my days as a Zoology student and have a look at what other Chelonia I might expect to find here in Europe. I like the Golden Greek Tortoise the best...

see http://www.chelonia.org/European_Gallery.htm for more!

MCP-me

rohancragg — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 20:47:48 GMT

I passed my first MCP exam today with a satisfyingly high score (hint: > 900)!

I'm delighted to be able to say with confidence that I am now a certified expert in Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual C#.Net and Visual Studio.NET (070-315)

[UPDATE] after kind congrats from Thomas Williams I thought I'd say something about how I managed this feat ;-)

For anyone else wanting to do the same, be aware that the MS Press books DON'T cover everything you need to know in the exams. While they're a good foundation they miss out material or don't go into enough detail. I have read very good reviews of the MCSD/MCAD Training Guide by Amit Kalani if you want to be sure of not missing anything.

Of course, there's no substitute for experience of actually using the technology (which is a good thing of course - dump the braindumps).

Crosspost test

rohancragg — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:10:59 GMT

This is just to test that my new dasBlog blog is cross-posting OK to my SharePoint blog and to my dotnetjunkies blog

my dasBlog has liftoff

rohancragg — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:10:34 GMT

Welcome to my new blog.

Don't expect much content just now as I want to work out how to migrate articles from my dotnetjunkies blog first, and to consider the implications of moving over from a blog that has a referral from MSDN!

[UPDATE]

The entries from my SharePoint themed blog carried over beautifully thanks to DotText2DasBlog. Kudos to Aaron Junod for the source code for that! I think there must be something very wrong going on with the install of .Text over at dotnetjunkies - I just keep getting a 'NullReferenceException' when trying to access BlogContent.asmx or SimpleBlogService.asmx.

Hopefully sometime soon they'll install the very exciting new Community Server 1.0 as announced recently by Rob Howard.

Indexing list items in SPS search results

rohancragg — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 03:10:00 GMT

I discovered today that Indexing List Items so that they appear in Search Results doesnt happen by default and I thought "surely this can't be right". Luckily (thanks to Daniel McPherson) if you follow this link you'll see that you can still enable this on a list-by list basis

New MSDN article on Custom Data Processing Extension

rohancragg — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:40:00 GMT

Christa Carpentiere has done yet another implementation of reporting off an ADO.Net Dataset but this time it's in an MSDN article, and it's in both VB.Net and C#.

This one add something interesting though, as it also shows how you might call an external assembly to generate the DataSet.

More on Data Processing Extensions

rohancragg — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 20:04:00 GMT

Toby Riley emailed me to alert me to his extension that can take a select query and execute it against any DB using a connection string as a parameter and pass the data back to the designer:

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/appworld

Another blogger of note has also come online, lead developer for the Reporting Services product by the name of 'Tudor'.