Snorre's Blog

MimeParser published on codePlex

2008-09-29T00:15:24.6759918+02:00

I have from time to time stumbled over the need to integrate a system with email receiving. Email sending has usually been a trivial task, and with the System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient in the .net framework this is the case. But the .net framework lacks a class that can do the reverse, take a message and build an object.

The reason for this is probably that this is a bees nest to enter. There are hundreds of email clients out there, and they all have a saying on whats legal in the message format. When you send an email you just have to conform to the standards one way or the other, but if you receive emails, you never know what you're gonna get.

Well I decided that I would try to do it better than the other open source projects out there that parses mime messages, and put it all on codeplex. Take a look at:

http://www.codeplex.com/mimeParser

My parser populates the standard System.Net.Mail.MailMessage so that the user don't have to learn a new object structure, and then the messages are easily forwarded in their original form.

Please give me input if you find a message that the parser doesn't handle correctly. I'm very interested in making it even more robust.

My first impression with CodePlex is so far very good. The wiki approach to all the project pages is nice. I can edit away my spelling mistakes, and the Team Explorer integration is very handy. They even added a Subversion gateway so for those that uses visual studio std or express it's just to install Tortoise svn and check in your code.

With team explorer I can add and maintain work items also for the project, and this seems usefull. Don't know how much rights I have been given in my project yet, so I don't know how much havoc I can cause, but I surely will test out :)

Serious bug in MailAddressCollection

2008-09-20T13:54:05.485+02:00

Hi

Found a serious bug in .net 3.5 sp1 today concerning email addresses and international characters. The class MailAddressCollection used in MailMessage has a nice overload Add(string) which parses comma separated email addresses and creates MailAddress objects of these. A very nice thought.

When passing email addresses with international characters, this method throws an 'System.FormatException'. For example:

Normalbakke, Sølvi ,"ulv, Per"

fails...

while

Luth, trude , Larsen, Kamuf

works.

The strange thing is that this code works correctly. No Exceptions...

MailAddress m = new MailAddress("Normalbakke, Sølvi ").

I made this piece of ugly code to circumvent the bug. I know that there probably is a nasty regex that can do this more nicely, but the fact that you can have more or less any character in the display name of the address, makes this too hard to bother with. I spent an hour trying, without any success at least... Feel free to comment and improve.

                MailAddressCollection coll = new MailAddressCollection();
                string[] emails ="Normalbakke, Sølvi ,\"ulv, Per\" ".Split(',');
                for (int i = 0; i < emails.Length; i++)
                {
                    MailAddress address = null;
                    try
                    {
                        address = new MailAddress(emails[i]);
                    }
                    catch
                    {
                        address = new MailAddress(emails[i] + "," + emails[i + 1]);
                        i++;
                    }
                    coll .Add(address);
                }

The fact that MailAddress parses correctly, but not MailAddressCollection makes me think that the developers has duplicated some really closely related code here. tsk tsk...

Snorre Garmann

Upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 in an enterprise environment

2008-09-11T23:52:45.097+02:00

The last weeks my project which is 30 developers large, with an extensive continuous integration setup and a automated deployment, has experienced the joy of upgrading visual studio to 2008 sp1. With the size and complexity of our setup, I think we might have hit just about every bug and unpredictable changes in the upgrade process. Just to mention a few ingrediences, we use mstest, clickOnce, msbuild, team foundation server with extensive automation and customization (integration with nant scripts and the TFS api), web services, windows services, web applications, win forms applications, wpf applications, ssis projects, reporting services projects, sql server clr projects, message queueing, etc.

We have not upgraded sql server to 2008, and we probably will not in the forseen future, so we have to live with sql server 2005.

I thought I'd write a few articles about what quirks we had to circumvent before we were successful (more or less), so that others might have a smoother upgrade. The issues I will go through are:

- MStest, problems with converting mstest projects, and mstest 8.0 vs mstest 9.0
- clickonce, manifest problems
- al.exe missing
- tf.exe and missing workspaces
- new targets (.net 2.0,3.0 and 3.5), and references to 3.0 assemblies.
- resx files that misses code behind
- ssis projects and reporting services projects.

So stay tuned for the gory details.

Clipperz.com

2008-08-30T08:12:58.49+02:00

Hi
I'm starting off this blog in a sort of off topic manner, with a little recommendation. You might have heard about Clipperz.com before, but a good thing can't be repeated to often.

As most of you, I probably have been much too sloppy using the same, not too hard password again and again as I create new user accounts on more or less serious web sites. And I shouldn't have to remind you, (or myself) that this is not a good idea. Some of the sites I've used registered for even have stored my credit card information, or allows the user to order things on my account. And I have no idea how any of these sites protect my information.

I would have to assume that the more serious sites protect my information adequately, otherwise their business would not be trustworthy, and the would loose customers. But the less serious sites is probably not very careful with how they handle my password...

Ok, so why haven't I changed this before? One of the reasons is laziness of course, another reason is the lack of a solution that is both secure, and available wherever I go.

Enter Clipperz.com. The solution is simple itself: It's a web service that stores your account information in a database. So I hear you say, how can I trust this, and not the other startup web sites that provides a similar service? The secret is, I don't, and I don't have to. Clipperz.com works in a way that everything is encrypted and decrypted in the browser, and only scrambled data is stored in Clipperz.com's central database. That way, if clipperz.com's information is compromised, the intruders will only get the encrypted data, and no passwords, credit cards or anything, without asking me for my clipperz.com password. Very nice.

Clipperz.com helps you generate strong passwords for your accounts, and even has a one click solution that will directly sign you in to the site. This one click solution works fairly well, about 70% of my accounts worked with this.

You can also store other sensitive information with clipperz, like creditcards and pin codes etc.

Ok, so what is not so great about Clipperz.com? The sign in time for one. probably because of the heavy javascript encryption magic signing in to clipperz takes a while, so when you have to go through clipperz every time you want to sign in somewhere that is a little bit irritating.
Another issue is the organizing of the bookmarks. Now it is only one long list of accounts etc. There should be a way to tag or categorize the information so that there wouldn't be a long list of things to traverse to find your favorite login.

Clipperz.com is free. With that said they introduce a rather annoying popup every now and then urging you to donate. I can live with that, and after a few more weeks of usage I will probably donate, and the popup hopefully will go away :)

Anyways, I urge you all to take control of your passwords, one way or the other, and why not try out Clipperz.com

Snorre