Recently, I was asked by someone how to configure Exchange Server 2007 to get rid of the spam.  I gave that person a few hints and bingo!  No more spam in the Inbox.  So I thought I would post these here for the benefit of everyone.

Warning: I am not an Exchange expert so if you find something cheesy here, make sure to post a comment.  I sure don't want to mislead anyone.

First thing, make sure that Exchange Anti-spam Update service is up and running.  Ant-spam updates will be pushed via Windows update so make sure you update your server on a regular basis.

Next, in the Server Configuration section, click on Hub Transport and make sure that you see Disable Anti-Spam Updates in the server section in the right of the screen.  If it's disabled, it will say Enable.

Next, in the Organization Configuration section, click on Hub Transport and on the Anti-Spam tab.  You should see the various agents.  Make sure they are enabled.  If you don't see them, run the install-AntiSpamAgents script in the Exchange Management Shell.

Double click on the Content Filtering agent, click on the Action tab and set the actions for your needs.  These settings worked for me so far:

Delete : 9
Reject: 7
Quarantine: 4

That's it, you should see the number of spam diminish drastically.  A bit of a warning, you might play it safe by setting higher settings first and see the results.  You don't want to reject valid emails  ;-)

 

MailMergeLib is a mail client library. It makes use of .NET System.Net.Mail and provides comfortable mail merge capabilities. MailMergeLib corrects a number of the most annoying bugs and RFC violations that .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 suffer from.

I was having some performance issues with Outlook 2007.  When running idle, it was consuming around 20-30% CPU.  I know that Outlook is no small app but 20-30% CPU when idle, c'mon!

Trying to figure out what was wrong, I made sure I downloaded all the performance patches and I applied Office SP1 but still experienced a high CPU usage.

One day, I had the idea to disable all the non essential add-ins.  Looks like with every software application comes with an Outlook add-in.  Why do I need a SnagIt add-ins in Outlook?  Why do I need a MindManager add-in?  Nuisance if you ask me.

Guess what?  After disabling these add-ins, Outlook CPU usage dropped to 0% with peaks at 2-4%!!!

So how do you disable Outlook ad-ins?  In the Tools menu, select Trust Center.

Click on the Add-ins tab on the left of the screen and in the lower portion, select Com Add-ins from the drop down and click Go.

You can then uncheck non essential add-ins.

In my previous post, I explained how to set the Exchange Server 2007 anti-spam content filters and how you can quarantine emails likelly to be spam but how can you verify if they are really spam?

Using OWA, login in the mailbox where you send the quarantined emails.  You can see the emails with the SMTP headers but not the content.

To see the content, click on forward.  Then you'll be able to double click on the attachment and see the email content.

 

This article discusses how to create an HTML Editor server control for use within an ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 environment.

New Update! Mole v4.1 Visualizer with property editing. Mole is a high performance, full featured, multifunction visualizer allows detailed inspection of WPF, WCF, ASP.NET, XBAP's and WinForm applications. Editing of properties is now supported on all project types.

Watch a video by Chris Pels about working with cookies, a video by Noam Ben-Ami about the ADO.NET Entity Designer, and 3 more videos in the LINQ series by Scott Stanfield.

This article shows you how to bring revolutionary UI provided by MS Silverlight to the world of ASP.NET control development with the help of recent released ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP

 

The New Year saw Microsoft bestowing upon me the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for Groove. Thanks! I have been working very actively with Groove and its community since its beta days (June '01) when Ray Ozzie was at its helm (Microsoft acquired Groove in 2005).

Check Groove 2007 out - download a free trial and dive into the Groove 2007 Developer workspace from CTDOTNET Connecticut .NET Developers Group web-site (bottom of home page).

So this Consumer Electronics Show (my third one) - was a bit different from years' past. Whereas in the past two I had time to see the floor one or two days, and had less meetings - this one was packed to the brim with meetings from 6am - 11pm everyday! The great thing about all of the meetings - was that most everyone important who needed to get a closer look at our technology, did. 

 

The downside was - I didn't get to see as much of the show this time! But... Alex Marchicelli & I did see something awesome that caught our eye and will end up as our future conference room trinket: The Nikko R2D2 projector:

 

 

It's a high quality DLP projector - and R2D2 moves around too! The remote control is the spaceship from Star Wars, too!

 

Got an exception being thrown with only its name being displayed in the output window?

Want to catch that exception? Just click on Debug -> Exceptions (Ctrl D, E) and check the exception you want to catch whenever it's thrown:

Now the debugger will catch any exception of that type, regardless of whether it was handled or not.

Dependency Properties and Routed Events are special WPF mechanisms that can be used in place of the CLR's normal Properties and Events, since they are more powerful, although less typed. You can even define a dependency property or routed event without a matching property or event and one can access the property's value or attach to the event using simple code.

However, it seems that what you can do in code, you can't do in XAML. For instance, I have a control named Test, that has a property named MyProperty. If I decide against exposing it as a CLR property (maybe it only has meaning when used in WPF's markup), I can still use this line to set it:

this.test.SetValue(Test.MyPropertyProperty, 10);

The above line compiles, runs and I'm a happy camper. However, try to get the following XAML to compile:

<local:Test x:Name="test" MyProperty="10" />

You'll get: error MC3072: The property 'MyProperty' does not exist in XML namespace [...]

So what this means is that without CLR properties exposing them, you can't use dependency properties in XAML (the same is true for events and routed events).

It strikes me as odd that WPF's XAML compiler can't handle its own mechanism without requiring you to add more, unnecessary code.

AP - Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections.

The Jobs Site Starter Kit (JSSK) has been updated to demonstrate many features of ASP.NET 3.5 including themes, master pages, data controls, membership, roles, profiles and AJAX. JSSK is a web application that provides a platform for candidates seeking job and the employers to share their needs.

In our private discussion list, a few Regional Directors were raving about about a third party information Management system tool for Outlook called ClearContext.  In desperate need of help for managing my Inbox, I decided to give it a try.

After a couple of weeks it, I can say that ClearContext helped me tamed my Inbox.  Basically, it worked for me (your mileage may vary).  So what it is?

• It is an Outlook add-in that is not a CPU hog (see my previous post)
• It makes it easy to tag and file emails
• It color code emails based on priorities
• It can easily turn emails into tasks and appointments
• It can defer emails so you can take action at a later time
• It can be remind you if someone hasn't replied in a certain time
• It has a Vista Gadget that displays your prioritized emails

So far, what really worked for me is how easy it is to tag and file the emails.

Here's the toolbar where you can tag and file and email or an entire thread by selecting a folder from the dropdown menu:

Contacts are automatically assigned a priority by ClearContext after analyzing your Inbox but you can change it yourself:

The Vista Gadget displays your unread message prioritized by color the same way you can display them in your Inbox:

Here's a Flash video demoing the product:

At $90US, it is not cheap but it works as advertized.  You can download a 30 day trial here:

Looks like I'll be presenting at TechEd Israel this year!

Currently it appears that I will be doing at least two talks. One of them will be About "Deep Reflection", a 400 level session that will go deep into the bowls of reflection and back again. It's a very updated version of a talk I did a couple years ago, with all the new stuff added in .net 3.5. The second talk will be on the subject of Unit Testing. Either beginner or advanced concepts.

Here's a little poll.

If you live in Israel, and were going to TechEd Israel, please answer this quick poll to help us decide(don't choose other unless you seriously think neither of these fits into TechEd:

Expandable/Collapsable rows in grid using Javascript to show and hide.