Peter Shaw

Social media sites are 10 a penny these days. There are sites for messaging, sites for videos, sites for photos, and a whole slew more. One of the oldest ones, and one that’s still going strong, is Flickr. Now owned by Yahoo, if you have a Yahoo email account, you should automatically also be able […]

One of the things that makes .NET such a powerful platform is the ability to interrogate language constructs. The “reflection” subsystem is available in the base class libraries. This means that you can find out anything about anything. If you have a custom class, you easily can get the runtime to show you what’s inside […]

In the modern world of MVC, responsive design, and everything that surrounds the modern era of Web development, you may be forgiven for believing that you no longer have to detect the mobile devices coming to your site. You should just be able to craft your UI to “adapt” and let the browser and the […]

In my previous post on using secure sockets, I showed you how to create a self-signed certificate to secure communication using sockets, if you’ve not yet read it, you can read it from the link just cited. Securing socket communications, however, is not the only thing you can use a self-signed certificate for. You also […]

With all the talk of HTTPS and encrypted Web page communications these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that we don’t need anything else to protect our data. Many developers, however, don’t stop to think about security in the back end of the application they’re working on. Many applications need to make requests to […]

If you’re building an IoT (Internet of Things)-based gadget, one thing you might want to know about is when USB devices are attached to or removed from your platform. Specifically, as we’ll see in this post, you might be interested to know when a USB Thumb drive or other USB-based storage media is plugged in, […]

In the IoT world of embedded devices, small is beautiful and small doesn’t come much better than the NancyFX Web framework. Nancy is a small, exceptionally easy to use REST and service framework. You can use it in place of ASP.NET MVC; you can use it on its own in a self-hosting environment, just as […]

Quite often, if you’re using a small device (such as something that may be used at the core of an IoT-enabled device) you may not always have a full standard TCP or UDP stack. Many small devices are equipped with a simple GSM modem and a SIM card, and the only means you have of […]

This month, I was asked to include the topic of the “The Internet of Things,” or IoT if you’re one of these folks who watches all the buzz words as one of my posts. I happen to know that Windows 10 and its support for the “Internet of Things” is quite big news, and lots […]

In this ever-growing world of online Web-enabled apps, it’s not very often these days that we see .NET events being used much anymore. If, like me, however, you went through the mill of writing Desktop Applications using WinForms, events and how they work should be pretty much burned into your thoughts, just as much as […]

One question I see asked a lot in the various forums is: “How do a do use raw SQL using Entity Framework?” Many people think that, because they’re using an ORM, they don’t have access to the underlying database connection that they would have when using ADO.NET, and so can’t perform many of the more […]

Yes I know, it’s a strange title, but bear with me, you’ll soon see why. Every so often, you see things that seem to confuse all developers, regardless of time in the industry, or level of skill. The process of performing Boolean operations, unfortunately, seems to be one of these things. I’m writing this post […]