http://sourceforge.net/projects/no-cdo
This week, I will be doing something a bit different for my article and I would really like to get some feedback from the EE community. On Friday afternoon of last week I was asked to write a little bit of code to log into a remote SMTP server and verify a user's email address. This naturally didn't take very long but it seemed like it should be rather common functionality; in fact I found a few libraries that were a couple hundred dollars each which offered it. I decided to take my code and extend it a little bit to support the answers to some common questions I see on Experts Exchange and open source it with a BSD license.
I have also added some additional functionality to the library if you do not use the CDO mail attachment object to create your email. One thing I have been asked quite a few times in the past has been how to mail an attachment from a stream or other medium without the need to create a temp file. The EmailAttachment object has a static method on it which will handle this for you, .FromSteam() as well as a constructor that takes a byte array.
Since the library speaks directly to SMTP servers, a few other features are possible. The first of these is the ability to attempt to verify an email address with the remote server in order to validate the email during entry. Another feature which is available is the ability to directly send emails (as opposed to relay) as it allows you to get immediate feedback from the remote server as to the deliverability of the message.
Now for the feedback part: Here at EE we have a few thousand .NET developers. I propose that as a group we create a set of utility namespaces (under the BSD or MIT license) as well as FAQs to help out with many of these common questions. Given that this could lower the number of questions in EE, it will also go a long way in providing cohesion between answers and will help move the knowledge into a centralized area. These libraries would also be invaluable to a new developer trying to make their way into .NET as it would help pave their way through many of these more complex areas. I have created the following thread to discuss this further: Q_21604659.html.
Greg Young