Sending SMTP Mail With Authentication with ASP.Net

by demtron on Monday, March 02, 2009 05:14 PM

Many web hosting now require sender authentication when sending e-mail through a relay server.  These mail servers have their security locked down.  Sometimes, localhost is an available SMTP server option, but if a relay server is required, a little extra code is also required.

ASP.Net offers the NetworkCredential class for this purposes.  By setting the NetworkCredential property in the SMTPClient object with the appropriate credentials, authentication can be passed with the request.  For example:

Dim smtp As New Net.Mail.SmtpClient
Dim m As New Net.Mail.MailMessage
m.Subject = "the subject"
m.From = New Net.Mail.MailAddress("email@domainname.com")
m.To.Add("john@demtron.com")
Dim Auth As New System.Net.NetworkCredential("email@domainname.com", "password")
smtp.UseDefaultCredentials = False
smtp.Credentials = Auth
smtp.Host = "smtp.domainname.com"
smtp.Send(m) 

Storing XML in Cookies and "dangerous Request.Cookies value" in ASP.Net

by demtron on Saturday, February 28, 2009 05:32 PM

By design, when attempting to store XML data in a cookie, the .Net Framework will raise the a HttpRequestValidationException because request validation is enabled according to Microsoft.  This is a good security mechanism to help avoid script submissions via HTTP.  Rather than turning off validation, one way to eliminate problem is to use HttpUtility.UrlEncode and HttpUtility.UrlDecode to replace suspicious characters with acceptable characters.  For example, to store an XML string to a cookie, one could use the following code:

HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Set(New HttpCookie("Books", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(XMLstring)))
 


Converting .Net DataTable to an XML String

by demtron on Saturday, February 28, 2009 05:19 PM

Here is a snippet of code that will convert a VB.Net DataTable into a string of XML.

Dim SB As New StringBuilder
Dim SW As New IO.StringWriter(SB)
Items.WriteXml(SW, Data.XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema)

This code writes the contents and schema of the DataTable in to a StringBuilder by way of a StringWriter object.


Dynamic Column Creation Problem with Telerik RadGrid

by demtron on Monday, February 02, 2009 10:04 AM

As part of a large eCommerce project, I needed to be able to extend a grid control into a custom control and dynamically add columns.  I needed to change the order of events that determined when and how columns would be added.  After a rather large modification of several hundred lines of code, I found that the grid would throw  errors such as "Cannot create column with the specified type name".  AJAX sorting, filtering, and refreshes threw this error every time after the initial grid display.  This vexed me for over two days until I found the Telerik forums post at http://www.telerik.com/community/forums/aspnet-ajax/grid/dynamic-creation-of-columns.aspx.  The solution was to set the EnableColumnsViewState property of the MasterTableView to false and create the columns on Page.Init or on each Page.Load.

Sometimes, the easiest changes fix the most hair-pulling problems.  :-)


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