Man, I’ve been so busy at Match.com’s international sites.

Right now I’m in the process of migrating python to .NET and preserving business rules for tons of accent code. A few systems out there for email in .NET (ignoring CDO/CDOSYS and its great and wonderful world of pain). There is aspNetEmail. The problem with aspNetEmail is the fact that it doesn’t accept your own encoders and it doesn’t run correctly on Linux with Mono (the obfustication tool they used on it screws up strings which even break when called from .NET 2.0). I’m deep into DotNetOpenMail. Its really amazing and its released under a X11 (BSD modified) type license.

I’m having to focus on encoding for over 33 languages and 12 different character encodings (oh boy) and I need the fine control that many purchased componets can’t provide. Besides, ITS JUST EMAIL :-). Not everything is unicode (yet) in my work but still emails have to be sent out as the native character sets that everyone can read (and you have to make sure your emails are near perfect for some international and some web clients) so it means down encoding, cross encoding, removing accents on characters (when the target can’t read them), and so much more.

One thing I have found is that Mono on my RHEL 3 and 4 boxes in some cases handles latin based languages far better then .NET does on Windows. I haven’t tested Mono with the Asian languages becuase the data in the database was encoded in html entity tags (last ditch effort to make the html emails work on Hotmail and Yahoo in various smaller countries). Lots of fun though.

On another note, I’m pretty impressed with Microsoft’s Enterprise Library. Looks like a great candiate for a port (if it doesn’t work already out of the box). Also tinkering with the idea of a distributed transaction system for Mono/.NET. Lots of ideas, so much work, so little time!

UPDATE:
Here is the link to the Microsoft Enterprise Library framework which should be portable (at least the backends) to Mono. Microsoft Enterprise Library