This is a quick personal (kind of) post. I just wanted my regular readers to stay tuned. I will be back (am back). I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks. I'm writing a guide for the How TO Select Guides on Internet E-mail components, have been extremely
busy at work, and tie down pretty heavy by life.
My e-mail guide is just about finished. I covered 35 different packages, and generally had a lot of fun while busting my butt writing. My guide is slated to be released sometime around September (although it may be delayed). I knew a lot about MIME and SMTP, but gained a lot more knowledge in the area of IMAP4, POP3, and S/MIME. I also had recently used WebDAV with Exchange at work. Very cool stuff! BTW, I really like IMAP and if given a choice in the future I will not hesitate to use it. IMAP seems to be a good protocol for apps that need to monitor a mailbox; it assumes that you are going to be reading the mail while online, so all the mail folders and mail exist on the server (not on the client). POP3 seems like a great solution for people accessing a mail box; all the mail exists in a single folder and the protocol assmes that you will be downloading the mail and reading it offline. I know you probably know all this, but it's still pretty cool.
Oh yeah, in case you don't realize we cover both open source and closed source packages. We even review FreeSMTP by QuikSoft which is a free SMTP (send mail) component that can be used non-commercially. We also have a feature chart that has 65 different features listed with an indicator for each of the 35 products (all 65 will probably only be available on the online version of the guide).
I'll be starting another guide soon on Data Reporting and Analysis components... that's going to be an interesting guide to write.
I promise to write a little more often again. Oh yeah, I have a month's worth of posts in my head... a couple will be on client-side XSLT for those situations where you have a lot of data that you want to drop down to the browser... I wouldn't want you to simply use AJAX for that.
I also have another post on my credentials that make me competent to write about e-mail components.
I'm working on an add-in for VS.Net that will give VB-ers an IDE feature that is only found in C#. (BTW, it is a feature that is kind of taken care of in vs 2005... but we still have a few months for that). Oh yeah, I'm really good at announcing junk and then not delivering. I could almost release this one now. I will need some help figuring out how to release the source (I'm not maintaining a project that is for sure).