The first presentation of the night was from John Crawford. John maintains http://www.gasports.com. He went over how send mail from a site that has many users and gave some pointers on what you might want to look out for. He demonstrated how you want to check for valid email address to log into a website. He pointed out that you want to have people register for the site and only send them email that they want or that you really must send them. Like the reminders for passwords. John took us farther into the world of running a large web server that requires many users that are on the internet. He gave us the low down on how to send email for many purposes from a large site to the end user. He uses class for .NET from OpenSMTP.NET, which is an open source free class for SMTP mail. You can use this open source class to send SMTP mail, but he added locking to make sure no errors occurred. For mass email he uses another webservice, which can handle large amounts of email in order to send out broadcast emails.

Jim gave a follow up presentation using the System.Web.Mail class in Visual Studio 2005, but said it could be done just the same in Visual Studio 2003. He did a quick on the spot demo of how to code a simple email application for either winforms or webforms.

The second half of the presentation was about how to create an application to manage Excel with Late Binding vs. Early Binding. I was the presenter so this post might be bias towards me a little bit. I showed how you can open excel, create a file, close excel, and read each line cell by cell. I had a bunch of questions so I am pretty sure everyone stayed awake. The point that really made a big difference was how much better VB.NET is for late binding than C#. I showed that to write an application using late binging in VB.NET all you have to do is change the variables from strong types into variables of type object. If you want to do the same thing in C# you have to re-write the entire application.

Check out the presentation material

--Brendon Schwartz