Blog

In this tutorial I show you how to create your own custom twitter feed for your website, which you will have full control over the styling, like the one I have on my about page. It also pulls through the follower count. This tutorial is meant for an MVC website with .NET 4.5 which makes it suitable for Umbraco too.

Throughout your career and life in general there will be times where you feel uncomfortable when doing a job or a task. Your natural reaction may be to stop doing that task (if you can get away with it) or you may want to avoid doing it all together. My advice to you is to do it more often.

Here are my top 10 golden rules for becoming a better programmer

This 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.

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about the The Pomodoro Technique® for improving productivity. Basically, you work really hard and focus for 25 minutes without interruption and then you have a 5 minute break from it. You then go again for 25 minutes and have a 5 minute break from it, and so on and so on.

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 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.