Hey Dude – where’s my online tool?

Over the past 18 months I’ve been posting details of various online tools that I’ve encountered – but not this month I’m afraid.

Why? Well, frankly I’ve run out! I’ve got nothing!

I’ve been hard at work but haven’t actually found the need for an online tool that I haven’t used before.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t any tools out there – it’s just that I didn’t need them, not this month anyway. Next month may be different but I think it’s probably best to drop the ‘of the month’ banner and just categorise them as ‘Online Tool’

NDC London – A Little Review

So, the last developers conference (if you could call it that) I went to was way back in 2001 when we had WAP phones and if you had a Pentium 4 computer you were some super-techno hacker.

Well, time have changed somewhat, we now have smart phones with more memory than we had hard drive space back then and I’m writing this post on a workstation with 8 cores and 32GB RAM (and this isn’t even the cutting edge). Add to that the cloud, driverless cars and social networks with billions of users (for better or worse) and we have come a hell of a long way.

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and shell out for a super early-bird ticket and get myself up to London for a few days to Geek-Out.

Online Tool of the Month – converter.telerik.com

Telerik shouldn’t be a new name to you but if it is then I suggest you head on over to their main site, https://www.telerik.com/, and have a look.

This post relates to there Code Converter utility which I found a need for recently while maintaining a clients VB.NET application.

Although I used to develop mainly in VB.NET I am now predominantly working in C# and as anyone who has used both languages will tell you, flipping between one and the other is not exactly painless.

On this particular occasion I had an idea how I could fix the issue with the clients application code – but my idea was in C# – enter the Telerik Code Convertor.

The Scourge of Email Click-Bait

We all get some SPAM in our Inboxes – despite the best efforts of our email hosts, be they Google or otherwise. But another type of message is starting to gain traction and I receive a number of these a week now – normally from recruiters is has to be said – and they are akin to the Click-Bait links you see all over the web (you know, the ones that normally end with ‘you’ll never guess what happens next’).

Online Tool of the Month – base64-image.de

I recently had a need to create HTML email templates for a project which needed to include a couple of images, e.g. the company logo and feature image. I have of course done this in the past and just linked to the required assets on the hosting website – but this time is was different.

This time the website was potentially not accessible from outside of the local intranet and the requirement was to embed the images directly into the message.

One way to do this is to encode the images to a base64 string and use the resulting text, with a data:image/jpeg;base64, prefix in the src attribute of the image tag – something like this;

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/4QBoRXh....." />

Now all I needed to do was encode the images.