Send email in .NET Core using Mailkit and office 365

Using SmtpClient to send email .NET core is obsolete. The current recommendation is to use the MailKit library . Here is how to use it with the office 365 SMTP servers.

var message = new MimeMessage();
message.From.Add(new MailboxAddress("{from name}", "{from email address}"));
message.To.Add(new MailboxAddress("{to name}", "{to email address}"));
message.Subject = "{subject}";

message.Body = new TextPart("plain")
{
    Text = "{body}"
};

using (var client = new SmtpClient())
{
    await client.ConnectAsync("smtp.office365.com", 587, SecureSocketOptions.StartTls);
    await client.AuthenticateAsync("{from email address}", "{from password}");
    await client.SendAsync(message);
    await client.DisconnectAsync(true);
}

Difference between mit, gpl and apache software license

The MIT, BSD, and ISC licenses are “permissive licenses”. They are extremely short and essentially say “do whatever you want with this, just don’t sue me.”

The Apache license says “do whatever you want with this, just don’t sue me” but does so with many more words, which lawyers like because it adds specificity. It also contains a patent license and retaliation clause which is designed to prevent patents (including patent trolls) from encumbering the software project.

The GPL licenses (GPLv3, GPLv2, LGPL, Affero GPL) all contain some kind of share-alike license. They essentially say “if you make a derivative work of this, and distribute it to others under certain circumstances, then you have to provide the source code under this license.” The important thing to know here is that “derivative work” and “certain circumstances” both require some legal analysis to understand the meaning and impact for your project.

You can read more about it here;

Which License Should I Use? MIT vs. Apache vs. GPL

Don’t’ fail parent package if child package fails

I like to keep running child packages inside sequence container even if one of them fails. Currently they are failing;

The work around is to set Sequence container “MaximumErrorCount” property to 2 from 1. After doing that, I am still getting failure error.

What we need to do is to fake the result assuming master and child packages have proper logging in place if they fail. Go to the Properties of “ExecPkg – Child Package” and set “ForceExecutionResult” to Success.

Do the same for master package. Run the package;

You can see that child package has no issues despite the fact that this has been failed. We can confirm that from log table if it’s enabled on package level.

These are the default values for a new container.

Now lets stop and study. If we compare the package behavior against the property settings, this looks wrong. Here we have set FailPackageOnFailure=False, yet a Sequence Container failure is causing a Package failure. Why is this? Unintuitive attribute names. See this Microsoft Connect issue. You are not alone in your confusion. The official explanation from Microsoft is this.

Despite some pretty circular previous messages, we believe that the feature is behaving as designed. When you set FailParentOnFailure to false, the parent will not fail until the number of failures in the child exceeds the MaximumAllowedErrors threshold. When you set FailparentOnFailure to true, the parent will fail on the first occurence of an error regardless of the MaximiumAllowedErrors threshold.

Backup calendars and contacts in outlook

Recently I had an issue where I need to clean up my inbox in outlook. I lost all of my calendars, schedules and contacts. sometime you learn it hard way 🙂

My emails were sync with exchange service provider so they stay the safe. All I wanted to do is to backup calendars and contacts. Here is a step by step guide;

Click on File -> Open & Export -> Import/Export.

Select “Export to a file” and Click Next.

Select “Outlook Data File (.pst)” and Click Next.

Select “Calendar” and click Next.

Select location and filename for exported file;

You can do the same with contacts.

SQL Date Conversion from different data types

When we receive data feed from outside vendors, the date values are often like this;

Purchase Date
2020-07-12
NULL
'n/a'
''

The challenge is how to parse these dates and load them in SQL server table. Here is one work around;

DECLARE @purchaseDate nvarchar(10) = '9/30/2020 12:00:00 AM'
--DECLARE @purchaseDate nvarchar(10) = ''
--DECLARE @purchaseDate nvarchar(10) = 'n/a'
--DECLARE @purchaseDate nvarchar(10) = NULL

SELECT 
	CASE 
	WHEN ISDATE(ISNULL(@myDate, NULL)) = 1 THEN TRY_PARSE(@myDate AS date)
	END PurchaseDate

We are basically checking whether value is of date, if yes then we apply transformation logic.