Blog
Paul Seal's personal blog
Blog posts
This post gives you a step by step guide on how to install Umbraco on your local machine using Visual Studio, NuGet, IIS and SQL Server.
umbraco Intercepting content and member save events in UmbracoIn Umbraco, you may want to perform certain actions when a content item or member is being saved or created. This post shows you how to do that. This is relevant for Umbraco projects that use MVC.
dotnet How to use bundling to minify css and JavaScript in MVC and UmbracoThis post shows you how to set up and use bundling and minification in your MVC website. There are specific instructions on how set it up for Umbraco websites too.
dotnet How do you use the try catch finally blocks?I must admit, in the past when I just want some code to run, but it's not critical if it fails, I have written a try catch block which looks like this.
dotnet Please tell me you don't write if true equals trueIt drives me crazy when I see code where someone is checking a boolean to see if it is true or not and they write it like this.
dotnet MVC Custom Model Property Validation AttributesThis post shows you how to create your own custom validation attributes in MVC. You can then decorate your model properties with them on your forms.
umbraco Simple Umbraco search exampleThis post shows you how easy it is to use the default Umbraco search functionality in your site. It uses a basic form and then uses razor to display your search results.
umbraco How to create url rewrite rules in UmbracoThis post teaches you how to set rewrite rules for your umbraco site. You may want to force your site to go to a secure url or force it to go to a url with www. at the start. To add these rules, you need to go to the file /config/UrlRewriting.config
umbraco Creating members in Umbraco programmaticallyThis post gives you the code for creating members programmatically in Umbraco. When you use this code, you can pass in the member's username, name, email address and optionally you can pass in their password and optionally assign them to a role/group.
dotnet SHA 256 and SHA 512 hash examplesThis post contains examples of how to generate a SHA 256 and SHA 512 hash key with the examples in C# and VB.NET This solution matches the expected result for Ingenico's implementation for their payment gateway.
tools·dotnet LINQPadI recently came across this fantastic resource. It is called LINQPad. You can use it to test any C#, F# or VB snippet or program. You can even use it to query databases in LINQ or SQL. It's ideal if you find some code on the internet that you want to quickly test, or if you want to play with the new features in C# 6 without having to set up a windows console/forms app or website.
dotnet MVC client side form validationThis post shows you how you can do client side, unobtrusive validation on your MVC form. It assumes you have already set up your Model, View and Controller, but you just need to know how to get it to validate on the client side.