Michael James - Developer

Recently I have been working on an MVC Project, and tonight I got to the point where I wanted to output a date in a specific format, for example Tuesday 13th April 2010. Sadly DateTime formatting still doesn't allow you to specify output a suffix, you can do Tuesday 13 April 2010 but not what I wanted. I decided that I could achieve what I wanted by writing a quick HTMLHelper, this would then allow me to specify a datetime format string with a magic / special character which I could then replace for the appropriate suffix. Writing the helper was very quick and easy, if you want to learn about HTMLHelpers and how to write your own I recommend looking at Stephen Walther's Post on HTMLHelpers . The code for my datetimehelper is below: using System; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace mjjames.MVCHelpers { public static class DateTimeExtensions { public static string DateTimeFormat(this HtmlHelper helper, string dateTimeFormat, DateTime dateTime){ var dateTimeOutput = ...

Yesterday I decided to starting knocking together a quick application to help me backup my server to some local storage. The idea being that at any point I have a local copy of my server setup a maximum of a day old. The point of this application and how I've gone about writing it, what libraries I'm using etc will be part of a future blog post. I decided early on that I however I wanted to transfer files I wanted to do this over a VPN to the server. I had several reasons for this, being able to expose my files over a network share, more secure etc. My Application will be running on an old laptop, so I first thought about just always having it connected to a VPN using windows, and run the application as normal. However I then thought what if the VPN disconnects and I don't notice, how long would it take until I noticed etc. So I decided to make the application create a VPN Connection at start up and then disconnect from it upon completion. I figured that there would be a go...