Working with other colleagues, I found these C# syntaxes are still not well-known and used, so I thought of blogging on them.

1 – Properties Without Members

In the old days, before C# 3.0, we used to write syntax like:

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Working as a .NET software consultant in UK, I spent ages with the IT recruiting agents on the phone and had suffered their tricks. So, in this post, I thought of educating my software consultant colleagues of the agents’ sneaky tricks and dodgy tactics.

Recruiting agents, especially in the current credit crunch, are having less ‘productive’ work to do due to the reduced demands in the market, so they are spending more time wasting our “software consultants” time and resources rather than doing their actual role which is, obviously, recruiting!

Below are some of their tricks, tactics and some commonly used phrases on the phone:

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I have explained in The Three Steps of Building an ASP.NET Validator Control, how to build a validator control from the ground up in three easy steps and in a reusable format. I highly recommend reading it before going any further.

Here I am discussing the common validator control security holes that might compromise your forms security when left untreated.

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The standard ASP.NET validator controls such as the RequiredFieldValidator or the RegularExpressionValidator do not cover all validation requirements, so usually developers tend to create a CustomValidator for such scenarios.

A major problem with the CustomValidator is reusability, as if you wanted to use the validator in another project then there would be some copying and pasting and code duplication, then you have to maintain multiple versions of the same control.

The solution, as you have guessed from the title, is to build your own validator control when possible to promote reusability.

In this post I will be showing you in three simple steps how to build an ASP.NET validator control and take credit card number format check to show by example. I will also be building the architecture so that your validator and other validators that you will develop in the future could be as reusable as possible.

How to Check a Credit Card Format

Luhn check is an algorithm that checks if a credit card number is valid (format wise), so in practice, before you even think of doing any further processing on the credit card, this check should be satisfied.

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I got a question from Anthony Grace in the comments of my previous post Three Rules That ASP.NET Developers Should Know About SEO about Google Sandbox and thought of writing this short post to illustrate what is it and how to avoid it.

Google Sandbox is, in essence, the process of keeping your website outside Google search results for competitive keywords because your website has just been registered or changed owner.

When Google Sandbox

The sandbox usually starts when you register a new website and lasts from 6 months up to a year depending on factors that are only known to Google.

Google is also monitoring the domain registration information so this will also happen when the registered owner of the website changes i.e. you’ve bought a second hand domain.

Put simply, you are sandboxed when your website has valuable content and is SEO optimised and you are no where near the search engine top result pages.

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