Write an RSS 2.0 XML feed in C# and ASP.NET MVC

Between twitter and the plethora of other content driven social networks around the web these days, creating an RSS feed for your website's content may seem a little redundant. However, RSS still provides a uniquely simple way to get standardized and specific content, bypassing the regular clutter associated with social media feeds. Besides, it's not terribly hard to implement, so why not add it to your next project?

Strongly typed session data in ASP.NET and C#

Storing session data is often an essential part of web development, particularly if you have any need for user specific information, such as a username, or a set of permissions. One issue you will find in ASP.NET however is using the standard approach to storing session data does not lend itself to the same strongly typed requirements we see in the rest of the framework. This isn't a show stopper necessarily, but wouldn't it be nice to know a particular session value is of a particular type, and for your project to enforce this before compilation? To achieve this, we'll need to create a wrapper for accessing and changing session data.

Create a basic captcha in C#

The fight against contact form and comment form spam has turned up the heat in recent years as spammers become more active and sophisticated. For the average blog or message board administrator using popular and proven website software, spam is not usually a massive problem to contend with thanks to inbuilt anti-spam measures, often including the ever popular captcha. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make a captcha from scratch in C# with ASP.NET MVC, so you too can enjoy some level of protection from spam bots in your custom built projects.

Password salt and hashing in C#

If you have ever had to build a website database that stores sensitive data like passwords for user accounts, you should already know about hashing (and, ideally, salting as well). Storing information like a user's password in clear text basically means your entire security model revolves around the unrealistic prospect of always keeping intruders out. With hashing and salting, intruders still at least face the potentially daunting task of making sense of your data - they may have done all kinds of unspeakable things to your server, and they may have grabbed a copy of your database, but if all they can see is a bunch of usernames and foreign keys, they at least probably won't cause dramas for your user base and their accounts once you get things sorted and back online.