Blog

Over the years I have found many useful free tools to help me in my job as a Web Developer. In this post, I share 10 of my favourite free tools with you so you can get the benefit of them too.

This 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.

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.

It 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.

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.

If, like me, you like to write lists to help you focus on what’s required to complete a certain job, and sometimes break the bullet points into mini lists themselves, then this online tool should help you. Workflowy allows you to do just that, it’s free, really easy to use, and it is available on web, iOS and Android.

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.

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