Rami Vemula

In this tutorial, we see how to develop a simple Contact Page webform. This Contact Page is going to be a similar one to what we usually see in our day to day experience out in internet. Here we use AJAX HTML editor to enable Html email to the owner of the website. The basic outline would be – Users provide their general details like name and email, and also they can provide Html Message (using AJAX HTML Editor) in the Contact Page, where a basic validation is done as first step. Then we take the Html string, and send the same in the email to the authorized person of the website (typically owner) using SMTP settings (System.Net.Mail namespace). For ease of use, we use Gmail SMTP settings (host and port) for sending email. For better interactivity UpdateProgress control is used to show the progress of email routine.

In this part of the tutorial, we first create a Windows Service Project, then implement a Service called – ‘BirthdayEmailService’. Then we add a reference to our previously created Class Library – ‘EmailComponent’. We code BirthdayEmailService using Timer to perform the email sending task for every hour. Then we incorporate the Installer classes for the purpose of installation. Finally a Setup and Deployment Project is created for the Service. Finally the complete Solution is build and the exe file is generated which is ready enough to get installed.

In this tutorial, we learn how to send automated birthday wish emails to the customers of our product. We first design our database with basic details of every customer, and of course with a Email address field. Then we create a class library to hold the classes of database interactivity and to send email asynchronously. We use ADO.Net (for this tutorial I am skipping Entity Framework implementation, which usually I prefer to interact with Database. For generating EF modules of database, kindly watch this tutorial – Click Here) with a stored procedure for database interaction (primarily to fetch email ids of customers to whom we got to send birthday wishes). Then finally we use a Windows Service (which obviously run background in the server)through which the previously created class library is accessed and async emails are send.

This article provides detailed information on how to send Email using C# in a step by step procedure. Although there are many articles on the web providing the same info, many of them left out some interesting concepts untouched. Concepts like Alternate Views, Linked Resources add an additional fragrance to the world of Email in C#.

Out of my experience in the fascinating world of ASP.NET and C#, it’s been observed that many of the new programmers often run into lot of doubtful scenarios while performing an Email assignment. The thought of helping new comers is my prior motivation which made me to write this article.Read More…