Posts Tagged: MVC

Development — 9 Comments
11
Feb 11

Intro to ActionMailer.Net (Screencast)

One of the ways I like to learn is by watching screencasts.  I find that it’s easier for me to retain information.  I suppose I’m just a more “visual” learner.  In light of this, I’ve decided to record a short screencast introducing some of the basic features of ActionMailer.Net.

I’ve recently released a new version (0.4.1) of this library which adds support for true multi-part messaging and a whole bunch of URL and HTML helpers that you can use in your views.  ActionMailer.Net also has a pretty thorough set of unit tests, so feel free to hack around and let me know what you think! 

The Video

I’d love to make some more of these covering some of the more advanced features in ActionMailer.Net.  Any feedback is welcome and appreciated!

Cheers!

P.S. – For those of you that would rather watch the uncompressed video or can’t access YouTube at work, feel free to grab the video here (you’ll need 7-zip to decompress it).

Development — 35 Comments
26
Jan 11

ActionMailer.Net: Email Templates for the MVC Crowd

Over the past few days I’ve been working on an application here at work that will be sending emails pretty heavily.  Up until now, my usual plan was to just write a couple of helper methods that I could call.  These helper methods would undoubtedly use StringBuilder to do most of the grunt work, happily formatting my emails.  The problem with this approach, however, should be obvious.  There are tons of templates hard coded in C# with string literals all over the place… YUCK!

So I took a step back.  I realized that the Rails framework really has this nailed.  Through the awesome ActionMailer library within Rails, you can use the built-in template engines to generate emails almost exactly like you would generate a view.  This leads to very small helper methods, and it’s just so darn clean.  I think the MVC community could use a cool library like this, so I decided to write one.

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