Tutorial: Sending email from ASP.Net MVC 3 in Windows Azure – Part II

In Part I of this tutorial we prepared the framework we need in order to build an Azure email sending solution. In this second part of the series, we are going to focus on the Web Role part of the solution, where we build an ASP.Net MVC 3 site which will eventually produce the email content we will later on be sending across to our users in a scalable way using Windows Azure to do the heavy lifting.

Tutorial: Sending email from ASP.Net MVC 3 in Windows Azure – Part I

If like me you have been hooked by ASP.Net MVC 3 you have probably come to a point when you have needed to get your MVC 3 app to send some emails. Things such as account activation emails, password resets or just notifications in general. I have already covered at least two nice Nuget packages that help with the delivery of email from an MVC 3 app which you can find here and here. But what happens when you move to the hotness that is Windows Azure?

Windows Azure storage: A cheap way to backup your TFS 2010 off-site

I’ve been toying with the idea of having some sort of home-made backup for my personal Team Foundation Server 2010 setup for a while. My instance of TFS2010 is actually on a Virtual Host on some hosting company which I shall not name here as I don’t want to provide them with any undue publicity…

Anyway, as I have been in deep exploration mode of Windows Azure and all that it offers, it occurred to me that Windows Azure Storage is actually a very cost-effective way to store valuable data somewhere far away from its source, so that it is inherently secure from site failure/disaster. And so in order to protect my source code, I needed to put all these things together on an experiment that would not take too much of my time, and yet would give me all I needed (for now) to keep my code safe, and my sleep a bit less troublesome.

The irony is lost on Microsoft

This is not so much a technical post, as just an ironic observation. The latest incarnation of Microsoft “download everything” tool, the wonderful Web Platform Installer 3.0 tries to do a bit of advertising whilst it’s downloading and installing its wares. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the intelligence of Google’s offerings when targeting advertising, as you can see in the screenshot below. Whilst downloading Microsoft’s latest version of their Windows Azure SDK, their most wonderful service offering to date, they also decided to try and sell me “old fashioned” hosting space for any ASP.Net web pages I might be putting together… mmm, I know you have to be a cloud-savvy person to appreciate the irony, but it is funny for all 3 of us

Perhaps next time I’m downloading an update for Office 2011, they might want to sell me some floppy disks to store all those pesky text files…

AL

Fair is fair: ActionMailer.Net revisited

So, after doing a brief comparison and superficially evaluating a few alternatives for allowing my ASP.Net MVC 3 apps to send email as painlessly as possible, I settled for MVCMailer as the right alternative for my needs. So, I went ahead and did a bit of work towards implementing it just to realise that the project needed to take a completely different direction and mail would be implemented through the salesforce.com API as most of it would be CRM notifications to customers anyway.

Microsoft Virtual Academy: Where learning about the Cloud becomes a competitive game

If you are excited about all things Cloud like I am, but you haven’t yet heard, Microsoft has recently launched the Microsoft Virtual Academy, where people like us can register and be pointed to a lot of resources, many of them video tutorials, about Windows Azure and all the associated technologies. Now, what is novel about MVA it’s not so much the fact that a number of resources are made available for free to an eager audience, but how that audience is enticed to make progress through the tutorials.

ASP.Net MVC 3 Mailing Views: Successfully deploying MVCMailer in your projects

I’ve been meaning to get into the mailing part of one of my ASP.Net MVC 3 projects for a while, but I was always busy with something else. Finally the time has come and I’ve been looking around for the perfect solution. Once thing I was certain of was that I wanted to take advantage of MVC’s Views in order to produce the content of the emails, as I didn’t want to have to do the work twice, and I would like users to be able to access the same information both through email notifications as well as through the web application. And so I came across mainly 3 different solutions to this challenge (I’m ignoring the one where I implement the mailing functionality from scratch!):