Big thanks goes out to Carl Franklin and everyone at Pwop Productions!
They let me hang out at the studio a little but late Wednesday night - and even had me on the Dot Net Rocks podcast as a special guest for a few minutes! Check out episode 362, and all of Carl’s great content!
I’d also like to thank the MossMan, Randy Drisgill himself - cause, well he knows what he did…
I find myself using FireFox all the time. I never thought I’d leave IE, but since I develop web applications almost all day long, FireFox’s extensions are invaluable to me.
IE does have a few extensions, but they come nowhere close to FireBug!
Anyway’s, since I’m in FireFox, doing web development, I would like to look up web development documentation right in FireFox.
This led me to create my first browser extension - the MSDN Search plugin for FireFox!
It works exactly how you’d think it would. It is almost always faster than opening up the .Net or WSS SDK documentation as well. Please give it a try and let me know what you think.
To use it simply extract msdn.zip and place the two files in your searchplugins folder, usually located at: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Once you restart FireFox, MSDN should be available from your search box.
For those of you who don’t find yourself using the search box that often, here are a few tips to get you up to speed:
Leave feedback in the comments!
Download MSDN.zip
Recently I was using the System.Net.Mail namespace to send out email messages from a simple .net application. I was receiving an error which boiled down to “the server is actively refusing the connection.”
This message is not particularly helpful. If you run into this issue you might want to check that your mail server will allow SMTP relays. My server was set to allow SMTP relays - yet I was still getting the issue.
I found a Microsoft tool called SMTPDiag (for use with Exchange server) that runs through the network performing various test to find out why SMTP is not working.
I ended up failing on one of the final steps - connecting to the exchange server.
I ran
netstat -n -a
on the server and found that port 25 was open and listening.
Then on my client machine I tried to create the simplest connection I could to the server:
telnet [mailServer] 25
This refused to connect as well.
I checked the firewall to see if port 25 was blocked in some way and it was not.
I was basically flabbergasted and about to give up when my anti-virus program popped up to do an update. A light bulb went off in my head.
CHECK YOUR ANTI-VIRUS SETTINGS WHEN HAVING CONNECTION PROBLEMS!
McAffee ANtiVirus was blocking all outgoing traffic over port 25 on my machine. I didn’t even think about anti-virus blocking ports, but it is quite common, especially with mail ports. I felt like an idiot, but I decided to share my experience to help others out there.
PS - SMTPDiag is quite useful, and Marc Grote has a good tutorial on it.
