Mutliple object definition files with Spring.Net

Spring.Net is a great IoC (Inversion of Control) framework that allows developers to implement Dependency Injection using an xml configuration. In most cases, the Spring config will end up in either your app/ web.config files. However, in some cases, it may be desirable or necessary to keep the Spring object definitions outside your app/web.config files in order to be able to share them across multiple projects, eg your website and your unit tests. The Spring.Net framework has a feature to allows us to do this easily, but there are a few caveats that I will …[read more]

Using an Smtp client in ASP.NET MVC 4 and C#

If you need to send emails from your website, the .NET framework provides a very handy library for this:  System.Net.Mail. The configuration and testing is pretty straightforward so let’s get started. Firstly we need to configure the SMTP settings in the web.config. Under the <configuration> element add the following config section: <system.net> <mailSettings> <!-- Method#1: Send emails over the network --> <smtp deliveryMethod="Network" from="[email protected]"> <network host="your_smpt_server_dns_name" userName="your_smpt_server_username" password="your_smpt_ …[read more]

Editing xml files with Advanced Installer

As part of my #learn365 today I will post a new feature I've learned about the Advanced Installer application. Advanced Installer, for those who never heard it before, is equivalent to InstallShield and allows users to create powerful custom installers for a variety of apps. So today’s lesson is: How to edit xml files and keep them up-to-date with the repo. The problem in my scenario is that I have to edit the sql connection strings in all the app and web config files using the values supplied by the user during the installation. There are a number of …[read more]

About

Hi there! You have landed on the blog of Christos Matskas, a developer, speaker, writer, Microsoft Program Manager for Microsoft Identity and geek. I currently live  with my family in Seattle, WA. My goal in life is to become great at my job as a technical Program Manager, be an excellent father and husband and a geeky geek. Scrap that, I don’t want to be great, I want to be awesome! This blog is the testimony of my journey to reach that goal. As I grow, I document my problems, troubles, obstacles, bugs and worries and then I do …[read more]

Book Review: How to have a beautiful mind

This is a long overdue post of my second book review. So I will get straight to the point. I will start by saying that this is the first De Bono book I’ve read and I found it pretty average. It started off with a promising premise that by the end of the book the reader’s conversational abilities will have substantially increased. However, I found this not to be the case. The book is easy to read with short, some times too short, chapters that describe various conversation techniques. The idea of having a beautiful mind, based on …[read more]

Book Review: Brilliant NLP

Brilliant NLP was the first book in my list. I decided to start my 1-book-a-month challenge with this book as it comes highly recommended and has a few high reviews on Amazon. I don’t usually get excited by self-help or self-improvement books and this time was no different. However it was the first book that I’ve picked up about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and I was intrigued by the whole premise. The book is well written and easy to read without overcomplicated terminology. Instead, the NLP techniques are presented in a simplified way (too simple sometimes) with easy …[read more]

Hello and welcome!

This is my blog post. Pretty obvious, I suppose, but I had to start somewhere. This blog will serve a dual purpose. Firstly to allow me to share ideas, problems and coding solutions within .NET and SQL Server programming and secondly to allow me to share miscellaneous thoughts on other aspects of my life. The idea to start this blog was instilled to me during my SQLBits conference in London this past weekend. According to a couple of senior executives from the Microsoft SQL team, it is incredibly easy to make commitments in the future but always hard to commit …[read more]