Fresh Click Media

The guys over at Gravatar.com have been hard at work updating their service, and I’ve updated the ASP.NET control I developed to reflect the changes.

I just got myself a freshclickmedia.com Gravatar over at gravatar.com. A Gravatar is a little avatar associated with an email address, and quite a few blogs use them to decorate post comments. Signing up is easy - all you need to do is supply an email address, and image, and give your image a content rating.

The source of the gravatar image tag points to gravatar.com’s image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the email address to prevent email harvesting. A ‘max rating’ parameter prevents the display of unsavoury content.

There are a wide number of blogging gravatar plugins, so I decided to write an ASP.NET custom control to do the job. Here I present the control and its features.

With Visual Studio 2008 now fully released, I take a quick look at some of the new language features in C# 3.0.

One of the strengths of ASP.NET is the ability to write your own reusable custom controls, deploy them, and use them by simply dragging them onto a form from the toolbox. This tutorial walks through the implementation of a ‘TimePicker’ custom control.

I’ve been programming in C# for about five years, and today whilst reading the C# language specification v3.0, came across the null coalescing operator.
Much like T-SQL’s ISNULL function, the operator replaces null values with the specified replacement value.

Chances are that if you’ve been using Visual Studio .NET, you’ll have come across the concept of snippets - useful reusable chunks of code that are inserted after typing in a small textual identifier for that snippet. This tutorial describes Visual Studio .NET snippets and describes how you can create your own.