Efran Cobisi is the founder of Cobisi Software based in Padova, Italy. Efran, who is the recipient of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award including several Microsoft certifications, is the developer of EmailVerify.NET, which is a powerful software component that provides an ability to automatically check the existence of an e-mail address from within an ASP.NET application.
In addition to EmailVerify.NET, Efran also developed an SEO extensions tool which enables software developers to optimize ASP.NET MVC web applications for search engines and a proxy client component which provides an ability to easily establish proxied connections from both new and existing sockets.
InfoQ recently interviewed Efran about his work.
InfoQ: What prompted you to start Cobisi?
Efran: I started Cobisi because I need to be helpful to my peers. I began programming at 12 and joined a group of guys doing demos in Assembly language at 15 (in the mid 90s, it was common to see those kinds of applications). In those years I coded my first development library: a mouse controlling module for Turbo Pascal. Since then, I really love crafting tools and libraries for software developers, and starting with its very first release, I have found the Microsoft .NET Framework to be one of the best environments to integrate with and extend.
InfoQ: Why did you create EmailVerify.NET?
Efran: I started to develop EmailVerify.NET because I needed a way to block free/disposable email registrations on my websites and didn’t find any suitable component or library, at that time. Moreover, every other email validation library I tried had a very limited support for syntax validation, while I needed to be able to accept quoted words, non-ASCII domains and mailboxes, comments and address literals: this is something you must consider, if you plan to have a worldwide customer base.
To date, EmailVerify.NET can even test if a given email address exists or not, by connecting to the responsible mail exchangers and mocking an SMTP dialog.
InfoQ: EmailVerify.NET is the first product you launched. What is the response from your clients?
Efran: Despite the great difficulties we experienced soon after its debut - coding is just one of the multitudes of tasks you are required to accomplish when you build and sell development tools and software in general - it has given us great satisfaction since then. Our clients really love EmailVerify.NET, and we do everything we can to improve it.
InfoQ: We saw that Microsoft is one of your clients. Please shed some light as to where they have deployed your product?
Efran: Yes, we had the pleasure to work with several of the greatest companies out there, including Microsoft, Renault, GlobalScape, Constellation Energy, and Infor, and some of the most respected universities in the United States.
I am not allowed to disclose the details of our partnership with Microsoft, but I am sure they would choose us again if they were to find an email validation partner today.
InfoQ: Do you like the user interface and new features of Visual Studio 2012?
Efran: Yes, I have used the latest Visual Studio 2012 to test our Routing Assistant, a free Visual Studio extension that allows developers to easily work with ASP.NET MVC routes.
While I really like the new time-saving features and the overall speed improvements, I must confess I felt a bit displeased about the user interface theme colors at first. After a month or two of heavy usage with the dark theme, however, I have changed my mind and am now considering reconfiguring my Visual Studio 2010 colors too, as I am now in love with those relaxing colors and icons.
InfoQ: Which feature of Visual Studio 2012 did you like the most and why?
Efran: The ability to quickly filter items in the Solution Explorer, as it is really a time-saver.
InfoQ: Do you like Windows or web-based software development?
Efran: I personally like both of them. While I started working on desktop interfaces — I am sure I can enumerate at least one thousands different Win32 APIs — I have developed web interfaces since 2000. I am so lucky that I have used AJAX long before it got named that way (and I even authored a couple of technical articles in a professional magazine about the argument long ago). I also like console-based systems. Not only have I have started coding that way, but I am also a big fan of Windows PowerShell; I have also authored a book about the subject a couple of years ago, and I am currently a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for the Windows Management Framework category.
InfoQ: Please tell us something about your future plans of Cobisi and the roadmap for 2012-2013.
Efran: We are working hard to expand the number and the features of our products, so the next few years will bring several new additions to our offer. We are also offering a web-based hosted email validation service that we plan to expand and improve even further.
