One of the great benefits of Entity Framework and Code First for ASP.NET MVC application development is the ability to seed data for your application when you run your application for the first time. Earlier today I was working on an implementation of EF and Code First for a new app and I had all kinds of fun in Excel concatenating() my c# code to seed States and Counties in my app. Rather than force everyone else out there to experience the same joy I did, I through the code into a quick app and posted it on GitHub for you all.

I have recently been working on a new internal application for my family’s insurance agency and I knew I wanted to force a secured connection. Being an insurance agency, there are various rules and regulations regarding data security that you can’t take for granted. We use SSL connections for all of our web applications and I needed to force this new application to use HTTPS.

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the Telerik controls is that they do things out of the box quicker than the standard ASP.NET controls, but if you venture off the beaten path just a step or two you might be entering hell… I literally spent hours googling yesterday trying to find where someone else had actually accomplished this feat and much to my surprise, I had to pick and pull a line of code or two from 7 different sources just to get to a place where I knew I could finish what I was working on. Perhaps this post will save you all some time…