Microsoft Silverlight 3 Video Training

I love learning about new technology and Microsoft has been busy making (or paying for folks to make) a lot of free training videos.  If you want to learn about what’s new in Silverlight 3, visit the msdev.com site and watch some of the great videos.  The Silverlight 3 video’s can be found at: http://www.msdev.com/Directory/SeriesDescription.aspx?CourseId=122

And if you are interested in a more soup-to-nuts “How do I?” list of videos, visit http://silverlight.net/learn/

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow.  Learn as if you were to live forever.”  — Mahatma Gandhi

Two awesome Silverlight examples

I believe in RIAs because developing an HTML/AJAX application is just painful.  And I believe that Silverlight provides an excellent RIA solution.  For two great examples of Silverlight in action look at:

http://windows4all.com/

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and,

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/

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These both look and feel like desktop applications but are running safely in your friendly browser.

Be aware that CodePlex has a project for windows4all.com (http://windows4all.codeplex.com/) but all of the source code is not provided.  Just a Visual Studio shell application.  It would be great to sneak a peek at the code under the covers.

Windows Server 2008 IIS SMTP

Some random notes on installing, setting up and using the SMTP Server included with Windows Server 2008.

To begin with, make sure you have added the SMTP Server feature via Server Manager (%SystemRoot%\system32\CompMgmtLauncher.exe).

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Next, and somewhat confusingly, under Windows Server 2008, the SMTP service is managed by Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Manager (%SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\InetMgr6.exe).

Once setup and running, the SMTP service can be used as a mail forwarder and as a drop location.  But note that the SMTP service does not support POP3 (so you can’t use email clients for email reading).

When used as a drop location, any mail for any of the domains that have been setup will be placed into the folder C:\inetpub\mailroot\Drop.

Something interesting is that the service supports a Pickup folder.  The folder is typically C:\inetpub\mailroot\Pickup.  Any RFC-822 formatted files place into the folder will be sent via the SMTP service.  Please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297700 for more information.

It was initially unclear but the Send copy of Non-Delivery Report To: under the SMTP Virtual Server properties is an email address:

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And make sure to only allow relaying of locally (127.0.0.1) created emails by setting up the proper Relay Restrictions (from the Access tab of the SMTP Virtual Server properties) as shown below:

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I hope these notes help my memory in the future.