Who needs a chatbot when you can have a mailbot ?

While chatbots are the latest new craze, the concept of interacting with a business system has been around for a long time. Back in 2002 I wrote an email monitoring system for a retail customer who was sending reps and managers out into the field with Blackberry devices. When the manager was about to visit a set of stores they would simply send an email request to a selected address such as: storeinfo@domain.com along with a subject of: “STINFO store#”.

Once the request was received a background process would be triggered to parse the subject line, build a sales report and then format the data as HTML and send it back as a response. Theoretically a PDF, Excel, CSV or other attachment could be sent back as well in response to a query.

Fast forward sixteen years and we apply the term “bot” to just about any automation process. Since the term “bot” is used so heavily today you might call this request/response scenario an email-bot or mail-bot. I used to call it poor-man’s client/server because a request could be created and processed without opening up a web site or business systems directly to the web or other client application. This also allowed for a nice layer of security. As long as responses are always being returned back to the same authorized requestor email address and that address has been validated, chances are data can’t be compromised. Also since the mail-bot can only respond to a limited set of scenarios, it’s threat vector for being hackable is reduced.

A mail-bot pattern essentially works like this:

An email request is received by a monitored address containing a from address and a request in the subject line or email body.

Once the mailbox monitor process picks up an inbound email message, the message is parsed, information is validated and then a response is compiled if the request is from a valid email address.

A formatted response email message or file attachments are then returned to the requestor.

There’s a little more to it than what I described above, but if you’re thinking about creating a chat-bot, you might want to first do a proof of concept project using the mail-bot pattern to see if your logic is sound and if your customers will get value from such an information request method.

No matter whether you’re using an RPA tool or coding a custom business process the mail-bot pattern can help your team be successful interacting with vendors, employees and customers.

Fontawesome - FREE icons for web development

https://fontawesome.com/icons

Free Windows .Net Snippet Keeper Application

Free Snippet Keeper Application. This is my attempt at creating a useful Snipper keeper application. I also used a couple of notable technologies in this app: MetroUIFramework, SQLite for the data store and FastColoredtextBox for the text editing.
Download SnippetKeeper

NancyFx - A Lightweight Web Framework for .Net

I'm always looking for alternate technologies to use for creating easy to install and use app servers, web servers, micro-services and more.

A couple years back I came across the NancyFx framework for this. It works well with .Net and .Net Core to create self hosted web applications and services.
http://nancyfx.org/

Open Source Spreadsheets for your .Net Applications

If you're building .Net applications chances are you've had the need to convert data into spreadsheet format. Check out the following links for a couple of open source options:
NPOI
SpreadsheetLight
These also work nicely in conjunction with SQL Server, IBM i and other databases to quickly create Excel output.

VietOCR Open Source Front End for Tesseract OCR

Check out this OCR application if you need a basic open source front end to the Tesseract engine. VietOCR is a Java/.NET GUI frontend for Tesseract OCR engine. Supports optical character recognition for Vietnamese and other languages supported by Tesseract. http://vietocr.sourceforge.net/

Ublu Midrange and Mainframe Life Cycle Extension Language

I haven't checked out this project yet, but it looks interesting. From the Github description: Ublu is an interpretive language for remote systems programming of midrange or mainframe hosts from a Java platform such as Linux, Mac, OpenBSD or Windows. It also can run natively on IBM i ®, IBM z/OS USS ® or any other reasonable Java platform. https://github.com/jwoehr/ublu

Windows Software Installation Tools

I have used this product for the past 6 years for building Windows and Web based software installations. Much more affordable than Installshield and works very well.

Advanced Installer

Another open source option is Nullsoft

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System

Free App to Quickly Scan Documents to PDF and other file types

Cool open source scanning application. Scan documents with a single click. Easily scan with your chosen settings, or set up multiple profiles for different devices and configurations. Once you've finished scanning, you can save, email, or print with only a couple clicks. Save to PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or other file types.
NAPS2 Scan Documents to PDF and TIFF

Free Bootstrap Web Development Themes

Check out these web development themes which can be applied to your .Net and other applications that use the Bootstrap framework. http://bootswatch.com/

Free Web Development Books

Check out WebCodeGeeks for FREE web development books and other web development info. https://www.webcodegeeks.com

Dynamic DotNet Scripting for VB and C# - DotNetScript40

This DotNet Scripting project for VB and C# was Forked from NScript project on CodeProject and Compiled Under .Net 4.0

This scripting framework is a nice way to create dynamic VB or C# scripts that can be run as Console apps and integrated with other applications.


Original NScript CodeProject site link: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3207/NScript-A-script-host-for-C-VB-NET-JScript-NET

Github Site for DotNetScript40 site link: https://github.com/richardschoen/DotNetScript40

Description 

The project code has been renamed to DotNetScript40 and has been compiled under .Net 4.0, however I believe the software also has a .Net 2.0 dependency for use of the old VSA scripting DLL from .Net 2.0.

The DotNetScript40 solution has three projects:

DotNetScript40.exe - a C# console application for running .CS/.NCS scripts or .VB/.NVB scripts.

DotNetScriptW40.exe - a C# windows application for running .CS/.NCS scripts or .VB/.NVB scripts.

DotNetScriptLib40.DLL - a C# class library for running .CS/.NCS scripts or .VB/.NVB scripts.

DotNetScript40 and DotNetScriptW40 are very much similar to each other; the former can be used to run scripts that can output to console. DotNetScript40 shows error messages in console where as DotNetScriptW40 shows error messages using message boxes. It is DotNScriptW40 which can be associated with file extensions. Since there is lot of code that is shared by the two executables the common code is compiled in DotNetScriptLib40 and both the executables refer to this class library.

Sample usage
DotNetScript40.exe [ScriptFile.ncs/.nvb] [Parm1 Parm2]

Ex: DotNetScript40.exe hello.nvb

Free Microsoft Training Classes - Microsoft Virtual Academy

If you're looking to learn ASP.Net Core or any other Microsoft technologies take a look at the Microsoft Virtual Academy site. You'll find classes for ASP.Net Core and more. https://mva.microsoft.com/