Author Archives: admin

HTML 5 – The Offline Challenge

I. Introduction

Some time ago our team had to add a new feature to one of our web projects. There was a request to add a capability to allow the users to use the application in “offline” mode. It was a great opportunity to dive into HTML 5 and more specifically the “offline” part of it. The new features of HTML5 are pretty interesting, but also “tricky” and this is why I would like to share some of the challenges we met.

First, I would like to say a few words about the technology on which the project is build. That is ASP.NET application which is storing data in SQL Server database. This is not a public application and only authorized users can access it. The system allows the users to go through their business process by entering the information in some structured web forms and at the end it allows them to generate a Word document, which is their final product. The web application is completely client-orientated and there is a huge usage of jQuery and AJAX. The AJAX calls are handled by WCF services. Frankly, this architecture made the implementation of the “offline mode” pretty straightforward.
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Sending Email Messages with Embedded Images

Usually, when we implement email notification from various applications we send emails containing HTML body. And when there should be an image within the email body we put the image on a web server and use a reference to that image in the HTML code. Following as an example of this:

Hello world

 <img alt="sample image" src="http://webserveraddress/Images/sample_image.png" />

The drawback with this scenario is the need for connection to the web server when reading the email. This is causing issues, for example, when the server is part of an intranet network that is not always accessible by the clients. More