Online Tool of the Month – unminify.com

Minification and bundling of Javascript and CSS files is obviously a good idea when you are deploying your websites to production – but if you want to use a third-party, minified, resource and want/need to look at the unminified version – it can be a bit of a pain.

I recently purchased a theme for a website which came as a set of CSS, Javascript and image files. There were a number of pages which demonstrated the theme and it was pretty much what I wanted – but not quite, I needed to make a few very minor changes.

Online Tool of the Month – SelfSignedCertificate

In this day and age everything needs to be encrypted to prevent nefarious access to our data. Whether it’s our banking or medical records, our online email inboxes or our browsing and searching habits.

So, when developing websites or APIs I always start with an SSL enabled configuration – and in Visual Studio that’s a pretty easy thing to do, it’s just a checkbox really.

When deploying websites to production servers I, like millions of others, use LetsEncrypt to generate and renew my SSL certificates.

But what about that gap between Development and Production? I am of course talking about ‘Test Servers’.

I’m currently working on a few ASP.NET Core projects that will ultimately be deployed to Linux servers and in order to test this type of deployment I normally like to use a Virtual Machine (VM). This give me good flexibility and allows me to deploy to locally hosted systems with the ability to easily rollback configuration changes etc through the use of snapshots.

But what about the SSL certificate? I can’t use LetsEncrypt because the VM won’t be externally accessible for their system to interogate and validate. What I need is a Self Signed Certficate that I can install on my development system and the VM.

Personal Encryptor CLI v1.1.0 Released

It’s been a good seven months since I released the initial version of the PersonalEncryptorCLI project and in that time I’ve had more than a handful of emails asking me about the utility. Most of these were asking if I could/would be creating a Desktop version, i.e. something with a GUI. It seems only geeks like the Command Line – who knew 😉

Well the answer is yes, but I needed to clear the remaining issue that I had identified with version 1.0.0 – the need for the recipient to know the context of the encrypted content, i.e. whether it was a text file, an image or a Word document.

This was due to the initial release of the utility requiring the filename to be specified during the decryption process – including it’s extension. Now, if the user didn’t know that it was a Word document, how would they know to specify a filename with a .docx (or .doc) extension?

Another Xamarin Forms app about to hit the App/Play Stores

Smite is a wooden garden game based on a Northern European game and played around the world.

If you think of a combination of skittles and boules you’ll be pretty much there – but not quite, there are a few twists.

Each player will take turns to throw a wooden ‘smitter’ at 10 numbered wooden pins, arranged in a similar manner to those in 10 pin bowling.

• Knock over a single pin and you score the number on that pin.
• Knock over two or more pins and you score the number of pins that fall; knock over four pins and you score four points.
• Before the next players turn the pins are stood back up but remain where they fell, they are not returned to their original location.
• Miss all the pins three turns in a row and you are ‘smitten’ and out of the game.
• If any players score exceeds 50 points they are returned to 25..!
• When a player scores exactly 50 points the game will end when the round completes – all remaining players will complete the round. There can be more than one winner!

It sounds simple but when the pins start to spread out the game becomes much harder – I can personally attest to this, as can many members of my family..!

Online Tool of the Month – ExtensionMethod.Net

OK – not really a tool, more of a resource but I hope you will like it.

As you may know my language of choice is C# and since version 3.0 developers have been able to add functionality to existing types without actually modifying the type itself by using Extension Methods.

We are all used to the String methods such as ToUpper() and ToLower() – but what if you wanted to truncate a string to a specified length and apply a ‘…’ suffix?