Blog

If you enjoy writing code and solving puzzles, you will love Project Euler. It is filled with mathematical puzzles which require you to write some code to get the answer. You could use the problems as a chance to write out the solution in a different programming language.

This 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.

I 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.

This 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.

This post gives you some examples of how you can check for errors when retrieving web.config app setting values.

If you want your site to maintain the current scroll position when the page reloads or when you go to another page, this post should help you. It is ideal for paging, or for sites where you don't want to submit a form using Ajax, but you still want it to stay in position.

This gives you real placeholder images to use in your site concepts or examples. It randomly picks an image each time the page loads.

This post gives you the code to allow your page to load faster, by using lower quality images firstly and then replacing them with the higher quality version after the page has loaded.

A lot of websites use google maps to show their location, but they usually leave it with the default style. This post gives you the code I use to generate a map and shows you how to style it. It also shows you how to add a custom map pin icon.

Debugging errors can be difficult, especially when you need to see the errors inside the errors. This post shows you how you can get all errors as a collection of errors rather than them being hidden inside other errors. You can create an extension method like this one

You may have noticed the links on my site after each article which let you share the article on social sites like Facebook and Twitter etc. This post gives you the code I used for the icons on my site. Font gives you access to hundreds of icons, and allows you to stack them on top of eachother to create different icons. In this code example you will see I stacked the twitter icon on top of a circle and did the same for the other links.

I found this and thought it would be really useful, especially for designers or people mocking up sites. If you ever need a placeholder image, you don’t need to create one, you can just use this url with the size of placeholder image you want: