A Programmer with Microsoft tools

Developing an outlook helper–part 2 from 5–VBA

Series

Developing Outlook helper – introduction

Developing Outlook helper – javascript for Office 365

Develop like it was ‘9x:

In the early days to develop an outlook addon it was simple : Press ALT+F11 and wrote the VBA. ( in our days , you go to the outlook settings and enable macros)

The code will be something like this:

Public Sub IsUserInEmail()
    Dim current
    Set current = Application.ActiveInspector.CurrentItem
    
    If Not TypeOf current Is MailItem Then Exit Sub
    Dim m As MailItem
    Set m = current
    
    Dim name As String
    name = InputBox("Please give me the user name", "Find User")
    If (Len(name) = 0) Then Exit Sub
    
    
    If (InStr(1, m.To, name, vbTextCompare) > 0) Then
        MsgBox "The name " & name & " has received the email"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    If (InStr(1, m.Sender.name, name, vbTextCompare) > 0) Then
        MsgBox "The name " & name & " has received the email"
        Exit Sub
    End If
    Dim rec As Recipient
    For Each rec In m.Recipients
        If (InStr(1, rec.name, name, vbTextCompare) > 0) Then
            MsgBox "The name " & name & " has received the email"
            Exit Sub
        End If
    Next rec
    MsgBox "The name " & name & " has NOT received the email"
    
End Sub

Test like it was ‘9x:

If you want to test, open the email ( double click the email) . Then run with F5 and debug.

Deploy like it was ‘9x:

Send to the user the VBA script and tell him step by step how to copy / paste

Developing an outlook helper–part 1 from 5

Series

Developing Outlook helper – introduction

Developing Outlook helper-VBA macro

Developing Outlook helper-C#

Developing Outlook helper – javscript for Office 365

Developing Outlook helper – conclusions

I want to show how much the software have changed from the early days to now.

For this , I will show it was / is to develop / test / deploy a sample outlook macro/application that allows the user to find if a name is between the email addresses from an email ( in a international company this is rather a difficult task).

The part 2 will be implementation as an Outlook VBA Macro

The part 3 will be a VS addon application

The part 4 will be a modern Javascript Office 365 application

In the part 5 I will put the conclusions – but I think that you have an idea about what I am talking.

Friday links 200

ImageTagHelper in .NET Core–add data URI scheme

The ImageTagHelper in ASP.NET Core MVC (https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc) is lacking one attribute that I find somehow useful: a data uri to embed the image as base64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme )

I was curious about how fast it will be to make such a modification on my PC.

So the process was:

Downloading branch rel/1.1.1 from https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc as a zip file
Unlock the file, unpack, run MVC.sln with VS2015
Compile the entire project.
See tests ( also run dotnet test in the Mvc-rel-1.1.1\test\Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.TagHelpers.Test to figure what was missing)
Started modifying the file ImageTagHelper( adding
```
 public bool RenderBase64 
```
and creating FileBase64ContentProvider.cs with the (approximately) same content as FileVersionProvider

Adding tests to mvc-rel-1.1.1\test\microsoft.aspnetcore.mvc.taghelpers.test\imagetaghelpertest.cs ( also modifying mocker –
for my purposes, to read the file, I need file length

            mockFile
                .Setup(m => m.CreateReadStream())                
                .Returns(() => new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Hello World!")));
mockFile.SetupGet(f => f.Length).Returns(12);

Modifying HtmlTargetElement attribute from ImageTagHelper
Adding “Microsoft.AspNetCore.StaticFiles”: “1.1.0”, and app.UseStaticFiles(); to HtmlGenerationWebSite and going to http://localhost:5551/HtmlGeneration_Home/image

And that was all. Now I will see how to fork and submit changes 😉

Later Edit: Submit a bug, fork, pull request. Approved.
https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/issues/5694

Friday links 199

7 rules of logging ( and 7 notes)

Those are my 7 rules for logging (you can read also the side note for every rule)

So here they are:

Logging is good for developers, not for the user .

You should not re-invent logging framework – just use one that exists in your programming language.

The logging should not affect the usual behavior of the program.

You should log everywhere there is a layer made by you (including GUI).

If the software returns/throws a generic code for error,then he should log the concrete details of what happened and the time * although this should be automatically done by the logging framework).

The logging should be easy to configure ( where to log, what to log ).

The format in which are you logging should be easy to understand by an automatic text parser

Note ¹: Corollary : Every software needs logging and this should be performed as good as possible , with all specific details to understand the problem.

Note ² : Choose one that works well in multi-threaded application, has multiple outputs ( database, log file, console , others) and provides various levels of logging( at least debug, info , error). For .NET : log4net, nlog . Do re-invent the wheel – if you believe that you can make something better .

Note ³ : For example logging a function that modifies some parameters or logging variable.ToString() and this throws the infamous “null reference”

Note ⁴ : See http://liddellj.com/2014/09/09/log-all-the-things

Note ⁵ : For example, if you throw a generic exception “ Something bad happened “ in order to not bother the user with mundane details, you should log the primary error and the reason that you throw the generic exception

Note ⁶: This means it is easy for DevOps to configure the software to not log into production the debug levels .

Note ⁷: See http://dev.splunk.com/view/logging-best-practices/SP-CAAADP6

Friday links 198

WifiHotSpot

I have become tired of reading about how to enable Wifi HotSpot in Windows 10 . The reference is here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd815243%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 . ( also, for bandwidth throttling you can try https://github.com/jagt/clumsy and / or https://reqrypt.org/windivert.html )

I was trying to make a Windows Store application – but, apparently, it is very difficult to run command lines application from Windows Store/

So I made a small powershell file ( hosted at https://github.com/ignatandrei/WIFIHotSpot )

Enjoy!