Development and SMTP

[Rich Raffenetti]

I develop a program in Visual Basic which interacts with Active Directory
and occasionally sends email to various groups who need to be notified of
changes or issues. I have been using CDO which dispatches email via SMTP.
When developing in XP, I had SMTP on XP equivalent to SMTP on the server,
where the program would run. This was great! Now I build and test in Vista,
which now has no SMTP. So the whole development model breaks down. Not so
great!
For this testing, can I use an SMTP server (off the development machine) or
is there another solution? I prefer not to install some non-native version
of SMTP on my Vista machine. I prefer not to put special code into the
programs either.

 

[Rich Raffenetti]

For the record, I found that whereas Vista IIS does not have a local SMTP
server, it does have 1) a configuration detail to define a remote SMTP host
and 2) an alternative to deliver SMTP email to a configurable folder. For
me, either of these alternatives are quite sufficient to be useful for
program development. The CDO interfaces still function and my programs work
the same whether they are in a Vista development environment or running in
production on a Windows server with IIS SMTP services.
Rich Raffenetti