I need to figure out how to use the PayPal IPN thing. And for experimentation with PayPal things, you should of course not use live accounts. You could, but it’s probably not the best idea. Luckily, PayPal has something they call a Sandbox where you can create and manage fake PayPal accounts that you can experiment with.
It’s not very difficult to get started, but there was a couple of points that wasn’t totally clear to me at first. Therefore I thought I could document it here.
So, I was fooling around the other day with an HTML table and wanted to make the odd rows slightly darker. Figured I could use for example an 80% transparent black PNG to do that (or could have just assigned a darker color, but where’s the fun in that?). Either way, ended up making a little something that I thought I could share just for the fun of it. I learned a few things, so maybe someone else can too 
So, here’s how to make a small transparent PNG filler image on-the-fly using PHP
I just managed to mess up the MySQL root account. Not a smart idea. After some MySQL manual reading and some serious Google-Fu, I figured out how to fix it.
Tadaa.
After some digging around, I found that it actually wasn’t that difficult at all.
Putting something in an assembly as an embedded resource is pretty easy. At least if you are using Visual Studio. Just add the file to your project, click on it, and then under Properties set Build Action to Embedded Resource. And thats it!
Lets say we want an image called hello.png in a folder called Wopdidoo as a Stream.
If we are executing code in the same assembly, we can do as follows:
If you are not executing code in the same assembly you just have to get that assembly reference in a different way. I often use Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(T)), where T is some type you know exists in the same assembly as the file you want. The rest is the same.
As far as I know, you use the stream as any other stream. Not sure if it is writable though? Probably not… let me know if you have some brilliant clues on that matter
Remember to Dispose it when you are done.
I sometimes find it a bit difficult to figure out that string which identifies the resource. I then often use the following code to “find” it:
It basically just scans through all the resource names and prints them out to the debug console
