Malek's Moorish Tales

Being on a "Microsoft Flight", as strange as it might seem, or, for corectness sake, let's say a European avaiation "microsoft Developer circle" charter flight, has been quite an experience ...

In London, it was an algorithmic challenge to find out what gate the plane was boarded on ... later, it was a guy hunging on the reactor, and the guy just fell down (I didn't see it, but all the spanish guys around me where talking about it, and assuring me it did happen) ... luckly, he didn't seem to hve endured any injuries ...

One hour too late, we where boarding the plane.  well, we borded, but that does'nt mean we departed ...

One more hour, and the plane took off ...

Even if the plane was far from being on time, it did deliver, at least on the first part of the flight, the promise of being a microsoft thing ... the very first movie showing (its an eleven hour flight), was the .net Show covering Direct-X managed ...

All of the movies that followed, even though they were regular movies, they were cartoonish/alien stuf ... which reminded me of that slide I usuallly use with young developers (academia, certain customers) that states, with no ambiguity, that the main influence of developers is StartTrek ... which slide I borrowed from my friend Sidi Ali Maalainein (Microsost North Africa-TS Team) .... I just hope there were some impressionable people on the flight ...

Another totally unordinary thing was the meeting room in the front of the plane ...

Once in LA, thee was of course the very serious immagration finger print and photo taking ... which will be compared to the finger print and photo when departing ... just to make sure my finger has not changed its print during the pdc ... Really makes you feel more secure ...

Then, LA ... it's LA with its high suckiness potential (The level of suckiness is a new standard by the anti-suckiness commission, finalized in hammamet, Tunisia on last June 25 ... it is based on measures of suckiness taken by three major independent source, ie: clemens, steven, goksin and I ... Well, I don't have clemens' and stev's measurement, but for myself, it is strange, but the level of suckniness is keeping quite low ... Great Hotel, huge room, nice drinks and food, and it is warmer than Casablanca ...

   Some time ago, I swore never to format or parse anything anymore ... Well, usually one really doesn't have to, since there are often higher layers for most protocols. However, I have made an even stronger oath never to copy somebody else's code without either going through every detail of it, making it maintainable (comments and structure), and testing it to a fair level of confidence, before using it in a project (off course I'm talking about non copyrighted code).

   Well, I have not had to integrate email in my applications beyond the functionality of System.Web.Mail classes. Until today, when I had to do some authentified smtp mail sending, and some pop3/imap mail retrieval. I must confess I started by looking at some user samples and source code in the regular sites (http://www.gotdotnet.com , codeproject ...etc), and did find some intersting classes, except that they just did not satisfy my maintainability criteria, and would have taken me more time to arrange than just plain rewriting the code.

   Here I am thus, about a half day later, with a functional smtp client class (that replaces somewhat the smtpMail class of System.Web.Mail, and is able to do authentication using Base64 Encoded username and password, and send a System.Web.Mail.MailMessage object. I have not finished doing the necessary parsing for the pop3 retireved messages (I will have to postpone that until wednesday because of the many engagements I have tomorrow...)

   Attached is the code to my smtpManager Class.

SmtpManager.cs (7.81 KB)

   Jeff Sandquist  has sent me a bdc bloggers T-Shirt. It has "I'm blogging this" on the front, and a nice "Microsoft PDC03 I was there" logo on the back. Thanks Jeff.

   I guess this will give some visibility to bloggers among attendees ... too bad the pdcbloggers Url is not on the shirt ...

   One of my collaborators at the office just made me realize I have been receiving so many     T-Shirts that I just don't buy clothing anymore ... Thanks a lot everyone ...

   Jeff Sandquist  has sent me a bdc bloggers T-Shirt. It has "I'm blogging this" on the front, and a nice "Microsoft PDC03 I was there" logo on the back. Thanks Jeff.

   I guess this will give some visibility to bloggers among attendees ... too bad the pdcbloggers Url is not on the shirt ...

   One of my collaborators at the office just made me realize I have been receiving so many     T-Shirts that I just don't buy clothing anymore ... Thanks a lot everyone ...