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SourceVizor meets the notification, reporting, and admin needs of teams using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
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by Jeff Nusz

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Introduction

As the release date approached for its new product, CodeVizor, the product-release team at Interface Technologies (ITI) discussed ways to bring their new developer tool to the attention of the developer community. Over the preceding several months, many thousands of developers registered as members of ITI's DevCentral to bring themselves into the DevCentral loop. As part of their registration, they were asked whether they would like to be informed of updates and product releases. All but about ten percent indicated they would like to stay informed.

So the team decided to send all six thousand registered users of DevCentral a personal email message (except those who had asked not to be contacted, of course). But this posed a problem. We thought it would seem impersonal (even unprofessional) to send a batch email. We wanted, instead, to personalize each email we were sending to registered members of DevCentral. The goal, then, was to create a way to do a massive "email merge," where a single message could be personalized for six thousand addressees.

The Goal

My task was to write a program that could access a SQL Server database of DevCentral's registered members, then generate an email (in Exchange/Outlook) for each member. The application would need to save the emails to a specified Outlook folder for staging. This would allow us to organize the mailing. We intended to send the emails later in small batches - about 500 at a time. This would let us better control for errors, as well as reduce the burden on the server and network connection. We also needed a way to control the return address on the message, so they would originate from the DevCentral mailbox, not the address of the person preparing the message.

The following links outline the steps taken to build this application.

• Tools & Objectives
• Problems & Solutions
• Setting Up & Configuration