CodeFall

The HTML Agility Pack is an amazing .NET code library HTML parser. You can find out about and download it from CodePlex at http://htmlagilitypack.codeplex.com/. If you need to parse out HTML pages this is the library that you want to add to your app. It’s biggest draw back is decidedly its giant lack of documentation. So that others don’t have bruise their foreheads on their keyboards like I did all day here are my lessons learned.

I've been seeing a number of posts of reddit the last few days about different editors and IDEs that people use. Over the years I've worked on a huge swath of them, I even remember thinking that it was never going to get better then BBEdit.

These days I work at a full Windows shop which means .NET and C# day in an day out. It also means Visual Studio 2013 Professional is were I live. Combined with ReSharper it's not just a powerful C# IDE, but handles HTML, CSS and JavaScript incredibly well.

While it's not perfect Visual Studio is an incredible tool for those of us in the world of web. With even more awesome features such as Browser Link and support for new languages and technology like Node and CoffeeScript baked in it should definitely be on your list of IDEs to know.

After seeing this reddit post it got me thinking of all of the very terrible code PHP has let me write over the years. Now that I no longer work in PHP I feel like maybe it's time to impart on the world the stupidity in my ways.

I've always found the conversation (mostly from the noSQL crowd) to be interesting. Many seem to hold this belief that for them to "win" someone must "lose". But why?

ASP.NET has had a bad rap for many years now. A lot of it seems to be because of the "ASP" portion of its name. Just like PHP classic ASP was horribly abused and many developers have been forced to slog through some of the worst, most impossible to support code, ever written by humans (were these people actually human though?).

Well, that's my thesis at least. I started programming on the web in Perl, from there I moved on to PHP and eventually found myself were I am as a C# developer. I programmed in PHP exclusively for over 5 years. I loved it. I learned a lot about it, its quarks and why it really stuck with so many people. At its core it's simple.

But as I grew as a programmer I wanted more. After a discussion with another programmer I knew at the time, who was far more advanced then I still am, I went with C# to start the next leg of my journey.

For the most part the guide posted by Microsoft is very useful and can be found here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/enable-ssl/

The problem arises in the adding the thumb print step. The documentation doesn’t mention this but when you copy the thumb print out of certmgr.msc (Step found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432987.aspx#bk_Thumb) you can’t just paste it into the XML file. Doing so will result in the following error…