Tag Archives: open-source

abSee ‘ay be see’ – A/B Test library

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I have often wondered “What if” when it comes design aspects of a website.

  • What if this button was green instead of blue?
  • What if I call it an upgrade instead of a purchase?
  • What if the background wasn’t as dark?
  • What if I make that notification flashing red instead of dark yellow?

You get the point…

So I’ve been working on an A/B testing library with the 1 goal of making it simple to insert tests into my web applications, thus abSee was born!

abSee is in NuGet so its pretty easy to install. (hurray!)

Its usage is simple enough also:

Firstly fire up an instance of the Tester, do so by calling the Start function. Or you could filter out certain users here to only show tests for them. (non-Admins etc.)

protected void Application_BeginRequest()
{
    ABTester.Start();
}

From there we can fire off tests to the User where ever we like by calling the Test function. Now to make a test we need to give it a name, this will be used to identify what we are testing in this specific instance. Then you give the function the different options and it will randomly select 1 for you as the output and save the result.

var output = ABTester.Test("MyTest1", "A", "B");

After running the test we then need to let the Tester know if it was successful or not so we can track conversions of the different options. We do this by calling the Convert function with the test name from the test we ran before. abSee will then store that result for us as converted.

ABTester.Convert("MyTest1");

So now we are running tests, how do I see the results?

You can get results for a given test using the GetResults function, this function returns a list of ABSeeResult which contains a few details about the test instance as well as the option that was selected and if it was converted or not.

var results = abSee.ABTester.GetResults("MyTest1");

 

More detailed documentation is coming soon with details on implementing custom storage and user identification.

Feel free to leave me some feedback about abSee or even fork it on Github.

Easy Email Templates in .NET with FluentEmail

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Update: The “Replace” method of templating in Fluent Email has itself been replaced by a Razor Engine Template. See Luke’s Post here about it.

I always seem to forget how to send emails in .NET which to me seems like such a simple task. Lately I’ve been working on updating an older application of mine that’s soul purpose was to read a database and send emails depending on certain events. I had a look at the current code and saw something like this:

sb.Append("A Transaction has been made...<br />");
sb.Append("<table><tr><th>Reservation Number</th><th>Customer Name</th><th>Email</th><th>Sale Date</th><th>Amount</th></tr>");
sb.AppendFormat("<tr><td>{0}</td><td>{1}</td><td>{2}</td><td>{3}</td><td>{4}</td></tr>",
    transaction.Reservation, transaction.FullName, transaction.Email, transaction.SaleDate, transaction.Amount.ToString("C2"));
sb.AppendFormat("<tr><th>Invoice</th><th>Confirmation</th></tr><tr><td>{0}</td><td>{1}</td></tr></table>", transaction.Invoice, transaction.Confirmation);

Terrible! So I figured while I was updating it I’d work out a better way build up the HTML of the emails. I started with the FluentEmail Project (Luke’s Post about it). From there I added some basic templating features, such as loading a HTML file with placeholders for content and the rest is history…

 

With my recent updated to FluentEmail I was about to turn something that looked like the above code to this: (as always C# is the code of choice)

//Send Email!
var email = Email
            .From(_fromEmail)
            .To(toAddresses)
            .Subject(string.Format("Siriusware Emailer Confirmation #{0}", transaction.Confirmation))
            .UsingTemplate(@"C:\Emailer\TransactionTemplate.htm")
            .Replace("<%Reservation%>", transaction.Reservation)
            .Replace("<%FullName%>", transaction.FullName)
            .Replace("<%SaleDate%>", transaction.SaleDate.ToShortDateString())
            .Replace("<%Amount%>", transaction.Amount.ToString("C2"))
            .Replace("<%Invoice%>", transaction.Invoice)
            .Replace("<%Confirmation%>", transaction.Confirmation)
            .UsingClient(new SmtpClient(_mailhost));
email.Send();

 

The HTML inside TransactionTemplate.htm has the below code. This is a basic example but demonstrates the usage of the templates.

<html>
<head>
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    A Transaction has been made...<br />
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>Reservation Number</th>
            <th>Customer Name</th>
            <th>Email</th>
            <th>Sale Date</th>
            <th>Amount</th>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><%Reservation%></td>
            <td><%FullName%></td>
            <td><%Email%></td>
            <td><%SaleDate%></td>
            <td><%Amount%></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <th>Invoice</th>
            <th>Confirmation</th>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><%Invoice%></td>
            <td><%Confirmation%></td>
        </tr>
    </table>
</body>
</html>

Pretty damn easy if you ask me.

This also give me the flexibility to edit the HTML file in a proper editor instead of concatenating all those strings together. The main idea was inspired by the MailDefinition class built into .NET but I didnt like the face that: 1 it was part of the System.Web.UI.WebControls namespace when its not a Web Control and wouldnt be used as one. And 2, It attempted to use another Control as a worker for it. So I just extended MailMessage to add the functionality.

All you need to do is download FluentEmail from Github