I decided this week that I can put it off no longer, I need to start writing my sites in C# instead of VB.Net. For my own sake I need to come out of my comfort zone and learn to program in C# as more and more contract jobs I look at require it. It worked out quite well really as I am just starting a new site from scratch so I decided that for the new site I was not going to write a single line of code in VB.
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Archive for March, 2007
Finally taking the plunge into C#
Be wary of the hidden costs of online game rental
I want to share a small story of something that just happened to me, in the hope that it will prevent others falling into the same trap. I have been using an online game rental company for a while to rent Xbox360 games. I’m sure you know the kind of deal, pay xx amount a month and rent as many games as you want in the time but you can only have one out at a time. The company in question is called www.swapgame.com.
All was well until I decided to cancel the account as I didn’t feel I was using it enough and not getting my money’s worth. Now I had no real concerns at the time as I had also recently cancelled my Amazon DVD rental service and it was a totally painless exercise. With Amazon all I needed to do was fill in the online cancellation form, Amazon cleared out my waiting list and gave me a date by which I had to return my last hired out item, couldn’t be simpler.
So with this confidence I tried the same cancellation with swapgame, I filled in the online cancellation form and was told that I couldn’t cancel as I had a game out for rental. Hmm, I though if I just sent the game back they would send out another so the first thing I had to do was manually clear my rental queue, painfully one item at a time. So I cleared the queue and packed up the game I had in THEIR return envelope and sent it off. Now I just needed to wait for confirmation of the return and cancel the account.
And so I waited and I waited and then an email come through, notifying me of the next months charges just being taken. Naturally I was pretty annoyed by this so I logged into my account to see what was going on. I tried to cancel again using my account page and was told that I could not because I still had a game out, so I looked at my current rental list and nothing was showing. So I saw no other choice but to email the company.
Eventually days and days later I received an email stating that I hadn’t received the disk back and to cancel I would have to pay them the cost price of the game (£19.85) unless I could produce proof of postage. Apparently somewhere in the small print there’s a statement about getting proof of postage for returns, not that you’d know in they’re poorly laid out system. Of course I as any normal human being didn’t have the proof of postage as it never even occurred to me that I would need one. This was my mistake to assume that other companies would be as reliable as the likes of Amazon.
So after an email exchange with me expressing my disgust given the fact that I’ also jut paid £10 for a months service that I didn’t need they offered to combine the months rental with an additional £9.86 charge to cover the cost of the game. This they actually considered to be a fair deal. So here I am totally ripped off to the tune of £20 without a leg to stand on.
My advice is to be wary of the small print of these rental services as you can end up out of pocket when the post office makes a mistake, and to stick with the bigger better known companies like Amazon instead of the small unreliable vendors.
A Further Enhancement To My Asp.Net Error Handling Routine
About two weeks back I wrote about an error reporting and handling routine that I added to every page of my digital lard website to try and capture fix some of the many page errors I was getting. Here is a link to the article for reference.
The results of the routine I added were phenomenal, even though it was hard work I managed to fix around 95% of the errors. The problem I’m now faced with is the 5% left and I find them very perplexing indeed. It seems that no amount of information I throw back through email can help me get to the bottom of them and some of them do seem to be browser specific, for example there is one specific problem that always seems to come with Opera browser and even though I’ve downloaded Opera I cannot reproduce the problem myself. (more…)
Little Miss Sunshine: DVD Review
Last night I watched Little Miss Sunshine on DVD and I thought I’d just make a little post to recommend it. It’s a really great comedy but I suspect not for all, if you like comedies like “Sideways” or “I Heart Huckabees” then this should be right up your street.
It’s about a fairly messed up dysfunctional family who go off on a road trip to take the daughter to a child beauty contest. The characters of the family are the real gel that hold the film together and make it funny. You have the father who is a failed self help guru, the uncle who has just tried and failed to commit suicide, the son who reads Nietzsche and has spent nine months in a vow of silence. Then there is the grandfather who is a foul mouthed drug addict. The mother and daughter are fairly normal, grounded people and this contrasts well with the rest of the family.
I won’t say too much more for fear of spoiling the film for you, I will say though that the last 15 minutes or so were the funniest thing I’d seen in a long time and I was nearly crying with laughter. A really great film, give it a try, in fact find the best price for it here:
Little Miss Sunshine Price Search
Looking in totally the wrong place for an error
Today I spent literally two hours or so fixing a .Net problem that didn’t exist. Basically I had a usercontrol that was being used throughout a site and after moving the usercontrol to the opposite side of the page it no longer functioned. The control was there, but the content of it was not. I convinced myself that there was some kind of corruption going on after moving it from one side of the screen to another. Two hours later and after much scratching off my head, I realised the silly little problem that was starring me in the face all of the time.
When I realised how stupid it was, I was pretty annoyed to have wasted so long on it. It wasn’t a programming problem, or a corruption or even some weird thing with studio. It was one little line in my css style sheet that was messing everything up. God knows why I ever did it but at some point I added a custom style for the <span> tag which basically hid everything within the <span>. Yes I’m afraid it was that stupid, god knows why I did it, it had obviously been in there a long time but I had never had the right position of an element for it to cause problems.
It wasn’t all bad though, while researching the problem I did come upon a very handy little tip for referencing user controls inside the web.config instead of having to do it in every web page. Rather than reproduce the whole text here I’ll just put a link to the article below, enjoy:
My blog is mainly about programming in .Net 2, website promotion and affiliate marketing although I do have the odd ramble on about anything that comes to mind.
