Hi,
First off, the title won't make much sense! UmbMailer is the name of the mass mailer / newsletter system I'm writing. It supports things such personalisation (Dear %TITLE% %SURNAME% = Dear Mr Smith), Email tracking (when the email was opened, which links were clicked on and when), campaign scheduling (send at 14/02/2010 01:00:00 and only send a maximum of 10 emails per hour). It should be quite a nice addition to the Our projects, but it relies on a .NET 3.5 Windows Service. That application hosts a WCF service for the Umbraco parts to talk to (Umbraco hosts the email / link tracking system). My question is this:
I want to avoid direct database access to the UmbMailer db from the Umbraco parts so I implemented the WCF service described above. However, I am worried about how to consume that service using the Umbraco based parts for a couple of reasons:
Hi Gareth,
I don't have an overall answer for you, but can at least point you in the right direction with a couple of things.
1. I believe Umbraco v4.1 will be compiled against .NET 3.5 (still awaiting announcement on the release date).
2. Take a look at the Package Actions Contrib project - you may be able to use of the existing (community-made) actions? (Otherwise, speak with Richard Soeteman, he'll be able to tell you if certain things are possible with it.
Good luck with UmbMailer!
Cheers, Lee.
HI Gareth,
You can use .net 3.5 in Umbraco if you download the separate web.config file from codeplex. As Lee mentioned you can create package actions to add your configuration to the web.config. If your package action can be used by others and you want to share your package action, pelase consider to submit it to the Package Action Contrib project I'm running. When Umbraco 4.1 is released this project will be converted to .net 3.5 since Umbraco 4.1 will be native .net 3.5
Btw your package name triggered me because other guys in the community used UmbMailer first (now CmsMailer). Might be good to come up with another name when you publish it to our.umbraco.org
Cheers,
Richard
Great initiative, and as a contributor to #cmsMailer, here's a few notes:
- umbMailer naming should be changed (trust me, we've run into same issue, therefore we renamed ours to cmsMailer instead of umbMailer). Although there's nothing that can keep you from naming it umbMailer...
- Be aware that shared hosting probably won't allow to install windows services...
I certainly don't want to encourage you in writing this package, in fact, "competition" (as in your package will offer similar functionality) is a good thing, but I'd wait for a first beta release which will probably be coming out end of this month (unless you need your package functionality to finished sooner)
/dirk
hmm, encourage should be discourage...
/Dirk
Hi, Thanks for taking the time to reply. I will change the name - not a problem (taking suggestions?!). I look forward the the cmsMailer release - I assume it will be posted on the projects here?
The driver for this project is my wife's site - the worst type of customer (she knows when I'm slacking!) - I'm also enjoying the challenge so I will probably continue, but assess cmsMailer when it's released.
Thanks for your advice regarding the web service. In summary, I can target this package at Umbraco 4.1 with few config changes, pre-4.1 on the condition that a new 3.5 config file is loaded?
Thanks again,Gareth