Setting up Outlook.com and Hotmail Custom Domain Alias

I am currently in the process of moving over from a Linux VPS to a Windows VPS. Due to the limited resources of my current web server I am unable to run an exchange server to handle all of my email, calendar etc. I have therefore decided to make use of the relatively new Outlook.com for all of my website email addresses as it integrates well with the desktop version of Outlook. Previously, I had much more control over my email accounts compared to Outlook. This included the ability to assign multiple addresses to a single mailbox. I knew you could set up an alias for a Hotmail account so I began looking into how to set one up for my Outlook accounts.

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Umbraco Examine Search [Part 1]: URL Rewriting

One of the least documented aspects of Umbraco has to be the in-built Examine search mechanism. I’m going to do a couple of simple blog post’s to go through the whole process of building search into your site one step at a time. This first post is aimed at setting up nice url’s for your search page.

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Event Viewer Logging in C#

I spent the morning writing a Transport Agent for Exchange 2010 (another story!) to log some emails to disk. As it was on a remote server and remote debugging wasn’t possible, I decided to log some details to the event log. Now this must be the first time I’ve had to write the logging mechanism myself because I’ve never come across this before. When you try to use the EventLog.WriteEntry method you need to pass the source of the message (i.e the application name). So when I did this I get the following exception:

The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. To create the source, you need permission to read all event logs to make sure that the new source name is unique. Inaccessible logs: Security.

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UWE Harvard Word Formatting

An implementation of the Harvard referencing style based on the description by UWE for Microsoft Word 2007 and later. The file is based on “Harvard – Anglia” by Yves Dhondt (availble from BibWord) and has been adapted by Andrew Cartwright and myself to be similar to UWE Harvard standard. If there are any issues, please get in touch.

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NT Kernel & System using Port 80

I had been trying to set up Internet Information Services (IIS) under Windows 7 to use PHP and MySQL to save myself the trouble of having both IIS and XAMPP installed. After a short time I managed to get it running rather easily using the Web Platform Installer. This was great apart from a couple of small annoyances when developing PHP applications. After a few weeks of use, I decided it was about time to switch back to XAMPP as it removed all of the annoyances I had encountered – here, I ran into a couple of problems!

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XML Beautify

This is a small application I’ve built to transform unreadable, ugly XML into nice, clean, pretty, human readable XML. It is written in C# on top of the .NET framework (3.5). The software can handle multiple documents at a time (I managed to get it up to 180+ documents before giving up) and each file is syntax highlighted. All the software does is try to reformat your XML to indent your code and warn you of any structural issues with the document.

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CoffeePot (HTCPCP)

CoffeePot is based on the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (although slightly modified) and is used to order coffee remotely. The project is written in Java and is based on a client-server architecture. The server emulates a coffee machine, taking orders from anything that connects to it, be it the client or telnet, then reporting back to the client once the order has been completed.

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