Leniel Maccaferri's blog: embedded

Just got this working and would like to share how to get it configured since I could not find an explanation anywhere.

FluentEmail - All in one email sender for .NET and .NET Core is a great library to send e-mails.

Currently I have a full .NET 4.7.2 Console Application that makes use of FluentEmail.
My desire with it was to store the e-mail template (Razor .cshtml view) in an external class library and be able to use this view\template in the Console Application.

FluentEmail GitHub page has a sample code that shows how to consume that:

var email = new Email(bob@hotmail.com)
    .To(benwholikesbeer@twitter.com)
    .Subject("Hey cool name!")
    .UsingTemplateFromEmbedded("Example.Project.Namespace.template-name.cshtml",
        new { Name = "Bob" },
        TypeFromYourEmbeddedAssembly.GetType().GetTypeInfo().Assembly);

Steps:

1 - Create a Razor Class Library project. More on that can be found here:
Create reusable UI using the Razor Class Library project in ASP.NET Core

It uses .NET Standard 2.0 as its Target framework.

2 - Add Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core NuGet package to the class library.
This is to have Intellisense, etc in Visual Studio.

Install-Package Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core -Version 2.1.3

3 - Add a Razor view called EmailTemplate.cshtml to your class library.

4 - Right click it in Solution Explorer and select Properties. In Build Action, select Embedded resource.

5 - Add the following code to your Razor View:

@model dynamic
<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Some Title</title>
    <base href="/" />

    @*<link href="css/bootstrap/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" />
      <link href="css/site.css" rel="stylesheet" />
      <script src="_framework/blazor.webassembly.js"></script>*@
</head>
<body>
    E-mail template
    Hey @Model.Name,<br>
    <font size="14">You are so @Model.Compliment.</font>
</body>

</html>

Note that I’m using dynamic in the view code. This is just for testing. You can have full blown Models and use them in the templates as well.

6 - In your Console Application add a reference to the Class Library created in step 1.

7 - In your FluentEmail code, do the following in UsingTemplateFromEmbedded method:

email.To(configuration["emailTo"])
     .SetFrom(configuration["emailFrom"])
     .Subject(configuration["emailSubject"])
     .UsingTemplateFromEmbedded(
      "YourCompany.YourRazorClassLibrary.EmailTemplate.cshtml",
    new { Name = "Leniel Maccaferri", Compliment = "Cool" },
    Assembly.Load("YourCompany.YourRazorClassLibrary"));

The first parameter is the full class library (DLL) name + dot + Razor view name with .cshtml extension. The second parameter is the anonymous type that will be passed as the Model to the view and the third parameter is the class library assembly itself.

You're good to go!

This gives you a lot of flexibility.

You can add images, customize the HTML, CSS, have Layout pages, etc.

Hope it helps.

Go directly to solution with no bla bla bla…

I’ve been playing with RavenDB (a NoSQL document-oriented database) in an ASP.NET MVC 4 project for the past week. One thing I tried to do was to access RavenDB Management Studio UI so that I could see what’s actually present within the document store. This is important because one needs to check if docs are really being inserted, related docs are being deleted, etc…

Given that I’m running the embedded version of RavenDB (RavenDB-Embedded.1.0.499 package installed via NuGet in Visual Studio 2010), I was stuck trying to access the management studio since there isn’t much documentation on this subject when it comes to the EmbeddableDocumentStore. After struggling with it for about an hour of Googling and try and error, I decided to post a question at StackOverflow: Running RavenDB as an EmbeddableDocumentStore and accessing RavenDB Management Studio. Then I took a break to have launch and took a nap. After that I got back here to try a different approach and it really does work. Of course this is only a way to achieve what I want. This may not be the best approach but it’s enough. Just follow theses steps:

1 - Grab RavenDB latest build here:
http://builds.hibernatingrhinos.com/downloadlatest/ravendb

2 - Extract the files to C:\RavenDB-Build-499

3 - Edit the .config file in C:\RavenDB-Build-499\Server\Raven.Server.exe.config to point to your embedded database:

<appSettings> <add key="Raven/Port" value="8088"/> <add key="Raven/DataDir" value="C:\MyProject\trunk\MyProject\ App_Data\Database"/> <add key="Raven/AnonymousAccess" value="Get"/> </appSettings>

4 - Click the Start.cmd present in the root folder C:\RavenDB-Build-499\Start.cmd

The server status output window should appear while it starts:

Figure 1 - RavenDB server status window

When the server finishes its starting process, the Silverlight Management UI should be automatically opened in your preferred browser.

Figure 2 - RavenDB Management Studio UI (Web UI)

Now I can see my docs, indexes, etc… and I hope you can too! :D

Note to self
According to John Allers, one should be able to access the Management Studio without having to start the server manually. That’s fine and I had already tried that, but I could not get it working at first (some days ago). This has led me to try everything else today and my last resort was posting a question at StackOverflow. After trying once more the same procedure, that is, trying to access the management studio using the URL http://localhost:8080, I finally got it working! Go figure. One possibility is that I had another service running on port 8080 when I first attempted to access the UI. As Windows has restarted since then, that service (Hudson probably) that was running on port 8080 is stopped and now everything just works as expected.

Things to do:

1 - Instantiate your EmbeddableDocumentStore this way:

_documentStore = new EmbeddableDocumentStore
            {
                ConnectionStringName = "YourDbName",
                UseEmbeddedHttpServer = true
            };

2 - Copy Raven.Studio.xap present in C:\RavenDB-Build-499\Server\ folder to the root folder of your web project

3 - Run you your web app

4 - Access http://localhost:8080 and voila… everything SHOULD work out of the box.

5 - Select Default Database:

Figure 3 - RavenDB Management Studio accessed without running the server manually