Umbraco MVP and .NET Web Developer from Derby (UK) who specialises in building Content Management System (CMS) websites using MVC with Umbraco as a framework. Paul is passionate about web development and programming as a whole. Apart from when he's with his wife and son, if he's not writing code, he's thinking about it or listening to a podcast about it.
Articles by Paul Seal
How to create url rewrite rules in Umbraco
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 Read More
Creating members in Umbraco programmatically
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. Read More
The Pomodoro Technique®
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. Read More
Free productivity tool - Workflowy
If, like me, you like to write lists to help you focus on what’s required to complete a certain job, and sometimes break the bullet points into mini lists themselves, then this online tool should help you. Workflowy allows you to do just that, it’s free, really easy to use, and it is available on web, iOS and Android. Read More
Test your programming skills with Project Euler
If you enjoy writing code and solving puzzles, you will love Project Euler. It is filled with mathematical puzzles which require you to write some code to get the answer. You could use the problems as a chance to write out the solution in a different programming language. Read More
SHA 256 and SHA 512 hash examples
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. Read More
LINQPad
I 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. Read More
MVC client side form validation
This 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. Read More
Helper methods for retrieving web config app settings
This post gives you some examples of how you can check for errors when retrieving web.config app setting values. Read More
Maintain scroll position on postback
If 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. Read More