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.

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.

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.

Workflowy allows you to write lists to help you focus on what's required to complete a certain job, 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.

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.

LINQPad is 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# without having to set up a windows console/forms app or website.