Gravatar ASP.NET Control

February 22nd, 2008

Update - 12 June 2008

An updated version of this post, containing full source for the control and explanation is available here.

Original Post

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.

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How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer Review

January 30th, 2008

Respected Freelance website FreelanceSwitch founders Cyan and Collis Ta’eed have written a book about Freelancing and made it available through self-publishing site Lulu.

I picked up a paperback version and here I present my thoughts.
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When in Rome, code as the Romans do

January 25th, 2008

No doubt most developers are in favour of coding standards, but something that has annoyed me of late is ‘coding baggage’. For example, former Visual Basic programmers using VB style in C#. Such style pollutes the purity of a language that has its own style for a particular reason.

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Suggested books for learning Ruby on Rails

January 3rd, 2008

I’ve been mainly a C#/ASP.NET developer over the last few years, but a recent interest in Ruby on Rails (RoR) has lead me to buy a few books to help me learn the framework.

Here I present a list of books, in a particular order, that I recommend to anybody learning RoR.
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A quick tour of C# 3.0’s new language features

December 5th, 2007

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

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Your first ASP.NET Custom Control

December 2nd, 2007

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.

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Displaying Amazon lists on your blog using PHP

November 26th, 2007

A common feature of blogs is the listing of albums or books that the author is currently enjoying. This article explains how to set up such a list in Amazon and show it on your blog using PHP and a REST web service.
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C#’s null coalescing operator

November 14th, 2007

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.

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Write your own Visual Studio .NET Snippets to improve your coding productivity

November 7th, 2007

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.

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Happy birthday to the BBC Website

October 29th, 2007

I’m reminded again today of how quickly time has passed with this story on the BBC Website.  I find it incredible that it’s 10 years since I first visited their site, a time when I was at university, studying computer science. Read the rest of this entry »