C# - Martin Normark's Blog

How To Get Expiration Date of Azure Mobile Services Auth Token

This is another post about Custom Authentication in Azure Mobile Services [https://martinnormark.com/how-to-do-custom-login-in-azure-mobile-services/]. Recently I also wrote about how the get the user logged in (owner of the auth token) [https://martinnormark.com/getting-logged-in-api-user-in-azure-mobile-service/] and all the code is available in my "Bootstrap Azure Mobile Services"

C#

How to do Custom login in Azure Mobile Services

About a week ago I introduced ZuMo.API [https://github.com/martinnormark/ZuMo.API] which is a Windows Azure Mobile Service (ZuMo) that was configured with a custom login provider that takes a username and password. Today I want to show how you actually login to the API (remember that

C#

Getting logged in API user in Azure Mobile Service

Last week I published ZuMo.API [https://martinnormark.com/introducing-zumo-api-a-bootstrapper-for-windows-azure-mobile-services/] to GitHub [https://github.com/martinnormark/ZuMo.API] which is a simple Windows Azure Mobile Service (using the .Net backend) that includes Custom Authentication instead of solely relying on Active Directory or login via Twitter, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Today

C#

Updating a Windows Azure Mobile Services project: Method not found

I've always tried to stay as much on the bleeding edge as possible. I used to donwload new version of Windows or Visual Studio as soon they released a public alpha or beta version. I don't like to use outdated software, and the same goes for

API

How To Receive E-mails in ASP.NET MVC using MailGun

Mailgun has a fantastic API for doing a lot of stuff with e-mail. Not only is it a breeze to use their dedicated SMTP service to send a lot of e-mails with great deliver-ability – it is also very powerful for routing e-mails back to your application. There’s a lot

API

How To Use the Google Search Suggestions API (AutoComplete) from C#

Google is currently receiving a lot of negative mentions for their lack of providing keywords [http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487] to website owners. Keywords used by visitors is such valuable information when running a website, and especially if you rely on that website for income! I figured it’s about time

ASP.NET MVC

Entity Framework Migrations "Cheat Sheet"

I’m a big fan of Entity Framework [http://www.nuget.org/packages/EntityFramework/5.0.0] (Code First [http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/16/code-first-development-with-entity-framework-4.aspx] , aka. Magic Unicorn Edition [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EntityFrameworkMagicUnicornAndMuchMoreIsNowOpenSourceWithTakeBacks.aspx] ), and in particular I am really beginning to like

API

Twitter Streaming API + SignalR + Google Maps = Powerful Stuff!

I’ve been playing around with a variety of APIs every once in a while. It is great fun to hack around with the enormous amounts of real data that are out there, and it’s always easy to get crazy ideas with it. Whenever you build something, the lack

ASP.NET MVC

Backbone and ASP.NET MVC: Use Nullable types as Id

As a side note to my blog post about renaming the idAttribute in Backbone [https://martinnormark.com/backbone-asp-net-mvc-rename-idattribute] when using it with ASP.NET (MVC), this post continues with the Id attribute [http://backbonejs.org/#Model-idAttribute]. The Id attribute in Backbone is very important. Backbone uses it to determine if

ASP.NET MVC

3 Reasons Why Dedicated ViewModels in ASP.NET MVC is a MUST

I’d argue that using dedicated view-models in ASP.NET MVC (or any other MVC framework) is one of the things that has changed the way I work for the better. And for the better I mean more maintainable code, better designed code, more robust code — just better in all

ASP.NET MVC

Backbone and ASP.NET MVC: Rename the ID attribute

In Backbone, a model’s ID attribute is vital in the way Backbone handles models and collections. In a collection, you can call get with an ID and you’ll get back the model. The thing is, naming conventions across languages does not always agree. In .Net properties are named

C#

Entity Framework: Update single column

Yesterday I blogged about how to delete a detached entity [https://martinnormark.com/entity-framework-delete-record-by-id-detached-entity]using Entity Framework 5 by only using its Id. A common practice in many applications today is to not actually delete the entity from the database, but instead mark it as deleted and make sure your

C#

Entity Framework: Delete Entity by Id - Using Detached Instance

Entity Framework [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ef.aspx] 5, with the Code First [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/468777/Code-First-with-Entity-Framework-5-using-MVC4-and] approach can do some pretty powerful things without much effort. Create your model classes, and it spins up a brand new and shiny database for you. But sometimes

.NET

Use Recurly.js with ASP.NET (MVC), C# with this Nu Get library

Recurly [http://recurly.com/] is a full suite recurring payment service that lets you easily create subscription plans, billing cycles, handle customers, revenue etc. They made payment integration dead easy with their awesome JavaScript library called Recurly.js [http://js.recurly.com/] that you can use to inject a payment

C#

Make CSS inline in C# and ASP.NET using PreMailer.Net

Being able to make CSS inline is something you need all the time when sending HTML e-mails. HTML E-mails simply don’t render perfectly in all e-mail clients if you don’t make all your styles inline. Campaign Monitor introduced the ability to make CSS inline years ago [http://www.

ASP.NET

Making your ASP.NET Global Resource files work in JavaScript. IntelliSense included!

Any modern web application needs localization! You simply can’t ignore the huge amounts of people who doesn’t speak your language, or whose native language is different from yours. You’re probably using resource files (.resx) in .NET, but how do you go about getting values from your resource

C#

Translate text in C#, using Google Translate, revisited

A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about how to translate text in C# using Google Translate [https://martinnormark.com/2009/03/12/translate-text-in-c-using-google-translate]. Since then, an official AJAX API has been released, which is a much better solution. Reading the comments of the blog post indicates that

C#

Generate HTML e-mail body in C# using templates

Almost a year ago, I answered [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886728/generating-html-email-body-in-c/886750#886750] a question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886728/generating-html-email-body-in-c] on StackOverflow [http://stackoverflow.com/], about if there’s a better way to generate HTML e-mails in C# [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886728/generating-html-email-body-in-c/886750#886750] than using

C#

Unit test for verifying references from DataAnnotation validation to the ErrorMessageResourceName value

I love the new model validation features in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. One thing I don’t like though, is that the ErrorMessageResourceName is loosely typed. The ErrorMessageResourceType, however, is a System.Type which will be strongly typed by assigning its value using the typeof(Namespace.ResourceSetType) method. Since there’s

C#

Multiple SSL certificates on IIS using host headers

In IIS SSL sites have seemed to be limited to only one site per network interface, since you (from IIS Manager) cannot specify a host header binding on the HTTPS protocol. It turns out, that it is only a limitation in the UI. So to have e.g. two sites

C#

Search Twitter from C# using LINQ to XML

In some applications, it could be cool to have a feature that enabled the user to quickly get a glimpse of what people are saying on Twitter [http://twitter.com/] about the user or their product, service, company etc. For instance, a service like GetSatisfaction.com [http://getsatisfaction.com] has

C#

Automatically translate Global and Local Resource (resx) files

Yesterday, I blogged about how you can use Google Translate to translate a string in C# [https://martinnormark.com/post/Translate-text-in-C-using-Google-Translate.aspx]. To make it more useful than just a simple translator, and because I need to translate some Global Resource files for an E-commerce website that I’m working

C#

Translate text in C#, using Google Translate

*** This post is no longer up-to-date. Take a look at my new post, revisiting how to tranlate text in C# using Google Translate [https://martinnormark.com/2010/10/25/translate-text-in-c-using-google-translate-revisited] *** Sometimes, it would be great to be able to translate a text from e.g. English to Danish directly from

C#

C# TwitPic API client

I’ve spent some time lately, playing around with the Twitter [http://twitter.com] API [http://apiwiki.twitter.com/]. And along with that belongs the TwitPic [http://twitpic.com/]’s API [http://twitpic.com/api.do]. I’m using Twitter a lot, to stay in touch with tech news, other

ASP.NET

Windows Live Development - Authenticating users via Windows Live ID

With so many online services out there, you nearly claim a new online identity somewhere every day. You tend to use the same username and password couple for all of them, but sometimes your preferred username is taken, or your password does not meet the sites’ password policy. I reckon