How To Scrape Email in Microsoft Outlook - C#

• Posted by Brent on March 26, 2008 03:30
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Make the body of any email (ie. newsletters, press release's, etc) in your Outlook 2003 client putty in your hands with this C# code (sorry had to do a screenshot):

Don't forget to add a reference to Micorsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook. "Done" is a subfolder i created under the default inbox in my Outlook to hold emails that have been processed by my scraper. When you run this app you will get a security MessageBox in Outlook asking you to grant permission:

The box can be avoided using Outlook Redemption (which does work, I have used it) or you can do what I do, and just manually run the app and allow access for 10 minutes. Happy mail scraping!

Guy Kawasaki asks Steve Ballmer: Why do you want to buy Yahoo?

• Posted by Brent on March 25, 2008 17:30
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Guy Kawasaki interviewed Steve Ballmer at MIX '08 at the Venetican in Vegas earlier this month. It's very very interesing!  Here are a couple quotes from the first 4 mintues of it:

• Guy Kawasaki : "Why do you want to buy Yahoo?"
• Steve Ballmer: "We made an offer. It's out there baby!"
• Guy Kawasaki : "Why didn't you hire me back in '87?" ... "I think it's racist"
• Guy Kawasaki : "Steve Jobs never invites me to do this"
• Guy Kawasaki : "Don't pick up any chairs and throw it at me. Don't go monkey on me either!"
• Guy Kawasaki : "The Y word is all about the G word"
• Guy Kawasaki : "Do you think you have to do Google in?"
• Guy Kawasaki : "you can't even bring yourself to say the Google word can you?"
• Steve Ballmer : "Google, Google,Google,Google"
• Guy Kawasaki : "Do you have little pictures of Larry and Sergey that you throw darts at?"
• Steve Ballmer : "We're just the little engine that could."
• Guy Kawasaki : "What do you think about Apple? Is it a little chiwawa that you kick away?"
  

LOL, good stuff. Awesome interview! The whole time Kawasaki is sitting there with a MacBook Air on his lap! I highly recommend everyone check it out. 

Clickety: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/default.mspx

5 Things To Watch For When Selling A Website Online

• Posted by Brent on March 8, 2008 12:21
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I have a little bit of experience selling websites online now and there are a fews things that happen every time. I'm not talking about large websites here, just smaller one-man-show sort of sites - the kind you find for sale on eBay or SitePoint. Here they are:

1. By putting your site up for sale, you are basically exposing your sites entire business model for the world to see (and to copy).  So don't put your site up for sale unless you truly plan on selling it. Keep in mind it may not sell so be careful what you tell the world about it.

2. Everyone and their dog will hammer you with questions about your site. Not because they want to buy it, but because they are trying to extract information from you that they can use to monetize their websites. They will say they are interested, pepper you with questions, then disappear forever. This happns A LOT on SitePoint.

3. People will bid on your auction, when they have no intention whatsoever of buying it. Strange/weird but true.

4. A LOT of people that have no clue how to run a website will want to buy it. Be careful here because you could wind up selling your site to someone, only to get emailed hourly/daily with questions on how to do this, and how to do that. If you are selling smaller sites like I do, you can kiss your profit goodbye given the amount of your time they will take up with questions.

5. Selling a site is like selling a used car.  You will spend your time talking about the great things about your site, and buyers that contact you will spend their time talking about how your traffic is declining, profit is declining, etc, etc, even though it isn't true at all. Btw, I find this is the mark of a true buyer as well. People that really want to buy your site, will be the ones that are most critical of it. If they aren't being critical, chances are they are just trying to extract information for use elsewhere.

 There you have it, some things to watch for that will happen if you decide to sell your website, so prepare for it!

AJAX Control Toolkit - RequiredFieldValidator Extender

• Posted by Brent on March 6, 2008 23:54
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I just released the first version of the ASP.NET RequiredFieldValidator Extender control. The control is built on top of Microsoft's AJAX Control Toolkit. What is does is extend the behavior of an ASP.NET RequiredFieldValidator control to apply a CSS class to the control being validated if it is invalid (client side). It also will apply a CSS class to an ASP.NET Label control as well. For example, say you have a textbox on your ASP.NET page that is required such a name textbox:

If the user submits the form with an empty textbox, the result will be that the textbox and label will have the CSS class you specify applied to them. In my case, I wanted them to show in red:

And here is a screenshot of the ASP.NET Markup used to create the sample above:

With this control, all you need to do to add your custom CSS to a required field is to reference the assembly in your ASP.NET project, register the control in your web.config file,  and then add the RequiredFieldExtender as shown above to your ASP.NET Markup.  The control can be used against any control being validated with a RequiredFieldValidator control such as TextBox, RadioButtonList, DropDownList, etc.  I think this control will be huge time saver for ASP.NET developers who need to do client-side control validation with CSS classes.

Complete source code, assembly, and sample ASP.NET web app are available here  (Releases tab) at the control's project on CodePlex.com. I should note the Solution was built in Visual Studio 2008 against the .NET Framework 3.5.

Questions? Drop me a comment and I will try to answer.