Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

How to receive incoming emails in your Asp.net MVC app

Aymeric — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:40:49 +0000

WEEK PLAN now sends an email asking its users how their day went. They can reply to the email directly and their answer is directly added to their journal. This is how I have implemented this feature using SendGrid and Asp.net MVC3. 1. Set up your DNS SendGrid needs you to set up a [...]

Allowing your users to unsubscribe from your email notifications in MVC3 and Entity Framework

Aymeric — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:11:45 +0000

This is a step by step list of all the steps I took to be able to add a “Unsubscribe” link in the signature of the emails Week Plan sends to the users. Of course, users must be unsubscribed even when they are not logged in. This is how I went about it (took me [...]

Enabling automatic migrations with Entity Framework 4.3 on an existing database

Aymeric — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 02:12:56 +0000

Now that my online weekly planner WeekPlan has been migrated from Linq2Sql to Entity Framework, I can take advantage of automatic migrations. This is actually very simple to put in place and will save you (and me) many headaches in the future. First, execute these two commands in your Package Manager Console: Enable-Migrations -EnableAutomaticMigrations Add-Migration [...]

Migrating from Linq2Sql to Code First Entity Framework

Aymeric — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 01:44:45 +0000

The blog post about Entity Framework automatic migrations motivated me to finally move away from Linq2Sql and use Code First Entity Framework instead for my online weekly planner app. 1. Generating your model classes from your database I was using a .dbml file to generate my model classes. First, I needed to install the EntityFramework [...]

Sending emails in Asp.net MVC like in Ruby on Rails

Aymeric — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:42:30 +0000

Recently I found a nuget package that allows me to use MVC Views and Layouts to define how my emails should look like, in a similar way as how mailer works in Ruby on Rails. This article will show you how I integrated it into my online weekly planner WeekPlan. 1. Set up of the [...]

Siasto: smart and simple email marketing

Aymeric — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:05:58 +0000

I am turning into a raving fan of the Siasto team. Everything they do seem polished. I am not just talking about their design, but also the way they communicate with their users. They just sent me a nice and short email to inform me of a new feature. The email is well designed, concise [...]

Siasto: example of great reactivation email

Aymeric — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:53:52 +0000

A week or so, someone in Hacker News asked for some feedback on his new project management software called Siasto. In the comments people were raving about the user interface so I felt intrigued as to what makes a distinctively good user interface. I registered and tested the web application (my feedback on Hacker News) and [...]

Tasks a virtual assistant can do for an online entrepreneur

Aymeric — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:25:32 +0000

Virtual assistants are all the rage these days. Since Tim Ferriss democratized the concept with his book “Four Hour Work Week”, virtual assistants have become increasingly popular. And yet, many founders still don’t outsource. The reason why people don’t outsource after the fear for poor quality is that they don’t know what to outsource. Yesterday [...]

The 7 deadly sins of outsourcing

Aymeric — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 07:00:22 +0000

Outsourcing is getting more and more popular and has evolved a lot but people keep associating it with poor quality or frustrating calls with a customer support guy with a thick accent from halfway around the world. Outsourcing is a skill that can be learned. Below are the deadly outsourcing sins that business owners commit [...]

Making changes based on data: fixing our registration process

Aymeric — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:44:33 +0000

UPDATE: I have added the results of my changes at the end of the article I am currently working on Goalstribe a group coaching website and this month we are trying to prove we can sell groups via online marketing channels. After bringing sufficient traffic from Google AdWords, Bing and Facebook Ads, we haven’t managed [...]