C#.NET | Techartifact

January 23, 2011January 24, 2011

reCAPTCHA : Free Captcha service for ASP.NET

Its a common requirement that we require a captcha to be integrated on our page. I would like to mention a free captcha service which can be implemented in integrated on websites.

What is reCaptcha?

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows.
It’s Free! Yep, reCAPTCHA is free.
It’s Easy. reCAPTCHA is a Web service. As such, adopting it is as simple as adding
a few lines of code on your site.
It’s Accessible. reCAPTCHA has an audio test that allows blind people to freely
navigate your site.
It’s Secure. Most other CAPTCHA implementations can be easily broken.
It’s Popular. Over 100,000 sites use reCAPTCHA, including household names like Facebook, Ticketmaster, and Craigslist.
Whenever uses input data in reCaptcha control, they actually help digitizing books.

Moreover is very easy to integrate reCaptcha in our websites. Below are the steps
which are required to integrate it into a ASP.NET page.

Steps to Integrate reCaptcha in ASP.NET

Register for a reCaptcha key : As a first step we need to register for recaptcha keys. Navigate to Get reCaptcha URL to signup for the keys. After we register for the keys, we get a public and private keys which we need to use in our asp.net page. By default all keys work on localhost as well.
Download reCaptcha library for ASP.NET: Download the dll file from here. Also add the reference to the dll in the asp.net project.

Add reCaptcha widget on ASP.NET page : Insert the reCAPTCHA control into the form you wish to protect by adding the following code snippets:

At the top of the aspx page, insert this:

<%@ register
                tagprefix="recaptcha" namespace="Recaptcha" assembly="Recaptcha" %>

Then insert the reCAPTCHA control inside of the form tag:

                <recaptcha:recaptchacontrol id="recaptcha" runat="server" publickey="your_public_key"
                    privatekey="your_private_key" />

Make sure you use ASP.NET validation to validate your form (you should check Page.IsValid on submission).

As an example I created a ASP.NET page whose markup and code behind code looks as given below:

Markup:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="RecaptchaPage.aspx.cs" Inherits="ContosoUniversity.RecaptchaPage" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="recaptcha" Namespace="Recaptcha" Assembly="Recaptcha" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
     <asp:Label Visible="true" ID="lblResult" runat="server" />

     <recaptcha:RecaptchaControl
              ID="recaptcha"
              runat="server"
              Theme="red"
              PublicKey="6LcoxcASAAAAAGAQQz_xOTk4-ALrRQri_Cf8AuhL"
              PrivateKey="6LcoxcASAAAAALfZhquqene7_4bTrzmuqHBrkuk0"
              />

          <asp:Button ID="btnSubmit" runat="server" Text="Submit" OnClick="btnSubmit_Click" />

    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Code-behind

    public partial class RecaptchaPage : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

        }

        protected void btnSubmit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (Page.IsValid) 
            {
              lblResult.Text = "Captcha sucessfull!";
              lblResult.ForeColor = System.Drawing.Color.Green;
            }
            else
            {
              lblResult.Text = "Incorrect";
              lblResult.ForeColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;
            }
        }
    }

When I entered correct captcha text and pressed submit button following was the output:

When I entered incorrect captcha text and pressed submit button following was the output:

January 30, 2010January 30, 2010

Nullable Type in C#

Nullable type in C#
We can declare a variable as nullable when we want to know that a value has been assigned to that variable or not. Declaring a variable as nullable enables the HasValue and Value members. We can use the HasValue property on the variable to check if the value has been assigned to the variable.

Example of Using Nullable
Let’s take an example of boolean variable. As we know the default value for a boolean variable is false. But we want that we should be able to know if user has selected true or false. So we define the bool variable as nullable like this:

Nullable<bool> testVariable= null;

Now we have the testVariable as a boolean variable having a value of null. Now when use the properties like this :

if(testVariable.HasValue)
MessageBox.Show(String.Format("Value is {0}",testVariable.value ));

August 17, 2009August 17, 2009

Anonymous Constructor in C#

C# 3.0 introduced a very compact way of initializing objects of a class.

Previously we used to initialize objects like this:

MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage();
            mailMessage.Subject=UIConstants.UIErrorSubject;
            mailMessage.Body = message;
            mailMessage.BodyEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(UIConstants.NewAccountMailBodyEncoding);
            mailMessage.From = new MailAddress(UIConstants.Me2AdminEmail);

Now, with the new feature known as Anonymous Constructors or Object Intializers we can do the same code in C# 3.0 and above like this:

 MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage()
            {
                Subject = UIConstants.UIErrorSubject,
                Body = message,
                BodyEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(UIConstants.NewAccountMailBodyEncoding),
                From = new MailAddress(UIConstants.Me2AdminEmail)
            };

In the C# 3.0 code, there is no constructor that corresponds to the way I instantiated the object. This prevents developers from having to create a different constructor for each different set of properties that need to be set. It also make the code easier to read.