Blog
Paul Seal's personal blog
Blog posts
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.
dev 10 golden rules for becoming a better programmerHere are my top 10 golden rules for becoming a better programmer
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.
dev The Pomodoro TechniqueI’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.
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.
dotnet Helper methods for retrieving web config app settingsThis post gives you some examples of how you can check for errors when retrieving web.config app setting values.
dev Maintain scroll position on postbackIf 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.