Create an Email Activation and Unsubscribe Script in PHP

If you weren't lucky enough to get a job with Google or Facebook, or even if you did, one of the first tasks you might be asked to do in your new career as a web developer is to create a subscription form. As part of creating this form will want to collect user information up front and then sending the user an email to have them activate their account. ...

Solving a Null Value When Posting a Simple String to a .NET Web API

The Problem: Many programmers, when creating a .NET Web API project, typically run into a situation where they want to post a simple x-www-form-urlencoded string datatype to an endpoint. They create the POST endpoint and attempt to post a string body to it only to find out that the value passed from the body is null. It can certainly be a frustrating endeavor to find a solution to this. After ...

8 Tips to a Better API Design

We have all seen the numerous articles and tutorials related to great REST API design on the web. They usually talk about proper coding techniques and how to expose the endpoints in some given language. While useful, and definitely needed, they often miss some of the fundamental high level ideas that make great APIs work. In this article we will cover 8 tips which I have learned consuming and providing ...

ASP.NET Variables Won’t Hold Their Value

When it comes to working with ASP.NET most developers who have done standard desktop development always run into the problem of their class variables not retaining their values. You create a variable at the class/page level and expect that when you click a button or change a server control on the page that those variables will be there when its event is triggered. But in many cases they are not ...

The Main Method Is a Conductor, Not a Member of the Orchestra

As many of you already know, I am a regular mentor on Dream.In.Code. With that I see common mistakes and design issues more than most people will probably ever seen in their full career. One design issue I would like to talk about today is the role of the main method and why it should be treated more like the conductor of an orchestra than 10 different band members. The ...

6 Helpful Tips on How to Learn Programming

Undoubtedly if you are new to the computer programming scene you have been overwhelmed by the number of other people telling you how to go about learning a new language. These people might be saying things like "Go to Codecademy.com" or "Check out this online tutorial". But what many of these programmers really miss is that people should use multiple resources in tandem when it comes to learning. In this ...