Blog

This 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.

This 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

This 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.

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.

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

This post shows you how to create an XML sitemap in your Umbraco website. I will share the code I have used to create my XML sitemap page http://www.codeshare.co.uk/xmlsitemap You will need an XML sitemap when you submit your site to search engines.

If you or your client needs to be able to create short urls or links to other sites without wanting to add it as a redirect in the web config, then this is the post for you. You can create them as umbraco pages that act as fast links or redirects.

Every now and again, there is a need to produce a list in a random order. I've found a very reliable way to do this using linq and the Guid class. It might sound complicated, but when you see the example, it should make sense and you should see how simple it is.

You may or may not be aware of the .ForEach() Method which is available on List<T> objects. It is very handy for shortening your code. Lets say you want to write a method which returns a list of MailAdress objects. A more traditional way would be to do the following: