Esendex Developer

Meebo

2007-10-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

Over time i've accumulated several hotmail / MSN accounts that have died away for one reason or another. I also have a google talk account and a yahoo account. The main reason i don't keep in touch with the contacts i have on these accounts is the hassle of having all the clients installed and up to date. So what if you could have one webpage that allowed you to be logged in to all of these accounts at one time, using one interface with all of your chat windows appearing in one place, sound good? Check out Meebo. In their own words

meebo.com is a website for instant messaging from absolutely anywhere. Whether you’re at home, on campus, at work, or traveling foreign lands, hop over to meebo.com on any computer to access all of your buddies (on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber) and chat with them, no downloads or installs required, for free!

It works really well and the interface is very cluter free and user friendly. What's more, they allow you to create widgets for your site / blog so people can send you chat messages from your blog directly to your meebo page, if you are logged into meebo at the time you can have an IM chat with your visitors.

I've added one to this blog so feel free to send me a message!

The Dark Knight

2007-10-05T02:38:00.001-07:00

One of my favourite recent films was Batman Begins, fantastic film, the whole feel of the underground, dark gotham city was brilliant. It had a more comic book like feel than any of the previous batman titles and the follow up, the dark knight, looks to be going in the right direction too!

There were some pictures knocking about the world wide web of Heath Ledger as the Joker and he looked fantastic, kudos to the make up team. The joker in the comics was a psychotic nutter who was completely unpredicatable. Whlie Jack Nicholson's Joker was a good portrayal it wasn't really very "Joker" like when compared to the comics.

According to Slashfilm Heath Ledger gets it right, scaring Michael Caine into forgetting his lines!

Hopefully the film can live up to it's predecessor and outshine Tim Burton's orignal batman film based on the same story.

Lego Star Wars

2007-09-27T08:51:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is a bit late but it's still pretty cool.
If you're into your lego and you're into star wars you might wanna consider ordering yourself a Millenium Falcon

It's a bit pricey at $500 but it should look amazing once it's assembled.

Something to do while you wait for Lego Starwars: The Complete Saga to be released! Then you've just gotta decide on your console of choice, with the Wii having motion controled lightsabers it could be a difficult choice!

Exploding Power Supplies Continued...

2007-09-25T03:11:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago i posted about my exploding power supply issues. Well, I received a shiny new power supply back and i also got a refund for my postage which was very good of them.

So i got home and plugged my new power supply in and.... nothing! I feared initially that the power supply frying itself may have taken a component or two with it but hoped it would be ok, it wasn't.

Now i've got a new RMA number for the entire PC and the company i bought it from and they have arranged to collect the PC from work which will save me on the postage for the whole PC. I guess it's gonna be another couple of weeks before i can get back to the WAR beta and XNA development projects.

NumberFormat issue answered

2007-09-21T01:02:00.000-07:00

I posted my issue on MSDN to see if anyone knew what i was doing wrong or if there was a workaround but one of the answers i got made some sense as far as explaining the omission of a "pence" symbol on the NumberFormat object.

Posted by IsshouFuuraibou...
I think because "pence" or cent symbol is an exception to the rule and not the standard. In many cases monetary systems don't have "pence" currency. For example the smallest denomination for the Japanese Yen is 1 Yen. This is true in many other currencies. You'll also see that in all cases where you have a "pence" symbol, you can also format it as "$"0.00. From what I've seen the culture info doesn't store the pence symbol.

The full thread is here.

While that is a fairly reasonable explanation it still seems to be a fairly large omission. Although the "pence" symbol is the exception to the rule it is applicable to a large portion of the world, all of Europe Australia, the US. Sounds like a flaw to me, surely you include it where applicable and omit it in the other cases?

NumberFormat object flaw?

2007-09-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've been working on some price tables on our website today and we want to make sure everything is formatted correctly based upon the users culture. Obviously you would assume that the the CultureInfo.NumberFormat would be the way to go and, for the most part, it is. If you want to format your numbers to have seperators in to break them up or format a currency string with a currency symbol then you're laughing,

decimal.ToString("N0", cultureInfo) will give you your number with the correct seperators in the correct places i.e. 10000 becomes 10,000 in en-GB culture.
decimal.ToString("C2", cultureInfo) will give you your currency string, i.e. 100.59 becomes £100.59

All is well, or is it? What do you do if you want the "pence" symbol for a culture i.e p or ¢? There is no property on the NumberFormat object to do this for you, at least not that i could find.

Anyone know what i'm missing here or have a decent workaround? I've got by for now with string manipulation but that involves hard coding the p or ¢ into the code. If we decide to introduce a new currency with a different symbol then it will require a code change.

System Convert Class

2007-09-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

As they say, every day is a school day. I was getting an "Invalid Format Exception" when trying to read a VAT rate from a config file and convert it to a decimal using Convert.ToDecimal(). It turns out that the Convert class by default uses

CurrentCulture.NumberFormat.CurrencyDecimalSeparator

I was testing a website and i had my CurrentCulture set to French which meant the value of 0.175 for the VAT rate was no longer valid as in France the currencyDecimalSeperator is ',' not '.'

Because our config entries will all be in English i created a NumberFormatInfo object which could then be passed into the Convert method call and it all works fine.

MMO Beta testing

2007-09-03T03:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago i was lucky enough to recieve an email from mythic entertainment inviting me to partake in the WAR (Warhammer Age of Reckoning) beta. Now, unfortunately, i can't tell you any more than that because of the NDA (None Disclosure Agreement).

MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) Betas are a bit of a mixed bag in my experience. The purpose of a Beta in an MMO game is to play as much of the game as possible reporting everything you find wrong with the game from text that is miss aligned to game breaking holes in the world and hardware crashes.

However, a lot of people just see them as a chance to play the game for free. They run round, complain when things don't work and never submit a bug report for the entire duration of the beta. Partly this is due to a lack of tools to do this. In past betas i have played you would need to hit print screen to take a screen shot, log out of the game completely and then write a complete bug report which then needs to be emailed or posted on a forum. For people to report everything they see, while it's fresh in their minds you need in game tools to do this. That way even the people who just want to play for free can just open the tool, write a few sentences and carry on with their game while contributing to the process that they agreed to when siging up for the beta.

I've played a few betas in the past at various stages from open beta which is generally a stress test for the final build, through to early closed beta where some of the content hasn't even been finalised and released. And then there have been games like Neocron which were released in a worse state than some of the early betas i've been involved in, anyone play that game? It had loads of potential but should have undergone better testing before release!!

Anyone reading this have any thoughts on betas they have been in, which were good ones which were bad ones? What made them that way? Obviously you can't talk about current betas because of the NDA's that companies use so keep the comments to past games! Hopefully my PC will be fixed soon and i can get back to the WAR!

Exploding Power Supplies & RMA's

2007-09-03T02:48:00.000-07:00

Well, it was an eventful week last week, i turned on my PC at home and nothing happened. So i checked the usual stuff, is the rocker switch at the back set to "ON", does the plug socket work... Everything seemed fine so i guessed the fuse had blown in the plug. I didn't have a spare fuse but i had a spare "Kettle Lead" which i plugged into the pc and then into the mains.

The resulting BANG and sparks, mere inches from my head, was a bit of a shock, followed closely by a burnt smell. I've only had the PC for about 6 months so i raised a support call with the supplier and they were suprisingly quick at coming back with an RMA form for me to return the power supply. The real kicker is that it will take 2 - 3 weeks for them to get a power supply back to me, that's assuming they have 1 in stock! Surely it doesn't take that long to figure out that the lump of molten plastic inside the power supply means it's broken.

I must admit though, every time i've contacted the support department they've been very quick in generating a response and it's been a pretty good response in most cases so i guess i'll just have to be patient.

Rolling back...

2007-08-20T04:18:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks here at the esendex office. What with introducing transaction scope and testing it. Then finding problems with it and rolling it back it's been hectic to say the least. Now we've had a request to add some more functionality to our ActiveX component so it's time to get back into the joys of things like log4cpp and C++.

I should get round to making some progress on my send sms gadget this week or next but we have an impending release so i guess we'll see how that goes first.

iGoogle URL Gadgets

2007-08-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

I've had a couple of hours this afternoon playing with iGoogle and gadgets again and i've decided that i will create a URL gadget that will effectively be a series of 3 pages. The first to send the message using form post and the other two as success / failure pages which in turn will re-direct back to the send page.

We already support this setup with formpost so i haven't got to write any backend code and by using a URL gadget i can get the layout done easily with 3 small web pages. I will also need to get the user prefferences (username, password and account reference) stored in the gadget itself so as not to clog up the gadget with unnecessary fields.

Hopefully i'll get a full day on this next friday and i'll be able to share my findings here, if not i'll try and update with what progress i make.

iGoogle and Gadgets

2007-07-31T01:52:00.000-07:00

Well it's been far too long since i posted, i've been fairly busy with getting married and honeymoons and stuff, but i'm back now and hopefully i'll be updating this a lot more frequently.

I was looking into how to get google desktop gadgets added to googles gadget page last night and i came accross some interesting comments about google desktop being able to add gadgets made to run on iGoogle but not the other way around. So i grabbed the standard "Hello World" gadget for iGoogle and tried to host it. Apparently iGoogle doesn't let you add gadgets hosted on your localhost so i uploaded it using Google Page Creator as recommended in the google gadget sdk documentation. This worked a treat, i uploaded the xml file for hello world and was able to add the gadget to my iGoogle page and to my google desktop sidebar.

After trying this i think it's worth doing some work to get an iGoogle gadget working and looking nice that can also be added to Google Desktop, i'll keep you posted on my progress.

XNA Breakout

2007-06-20T01:02:00.000-07:00

Well as i mentioned in my first post i've been working on a breakout clone in XNA. It's one of those games that gets made by most people when they start out in games development, either that or pong or tetris but it's simple and gives me a chance to play with XNA without geting into anything too complicated with regards to the game.

I've had two sessions with it now and im constantly surprised at how simple XNA seems to make things. I've probably spent around 4 hours and i've got a menu system, and a level of the game. As far as the level goes i have a ball bouncing around the play area and a paddle to keep it there that reacts to key presses. Adding 360 controller support would be very simple because of the way i'm handling input at the moment as well.

I reckon next time i should have some blocks on screen and a game to play so hopefully you'll have something to look at sooner rather than later.

Google Gadgets

2007-06-15T09:32:00.001-07:00

Well i've had some success with microsoft live gadgets and i was hoping to get an Inbox gadget working that could be put onto a Live blog or homepage and you would be able to check your inbox. I had some problems with the live API which i'm still hoping to work thorugh at some point but i did have some success with sending messages. I've also been looking at the google desktop SDK and i managed to get a gadget working that allows you to input your esendex account details and send a message from the google desktop sidebar. I need to tidy it up and make sure i'm handling all 3 "modes" it can be in, sidebar, expanded and desktop but i should have soemthing that can be downloaded and installed over the next couple of weeks!

Hello World...

2007-05-30T06:07:00.000-07:00

Hi,
this is a blog about problems encountered and resolved as a .Net developer at Esendex, a business sms provider based in Nottingham, England. Hopefully I'll be able to give you a light hearted insight into the world of .Net development here at Esendex and share with you any problems of interest and how we overcame them so that you won't have to go through those problems yourselves.

This is the new home of my windows live blog as i want to use google analytics to track visitors and i can't do that on windows live. I won't move any posts here from my live blog as it's still available but i will just give you a quick rundown on what i'm currently blogging about...

Web Gadgets and Google Gadgets: Here at Esendex we provide a business sms service as mentioned above and i thought that our service would give me a good opportunity to look into gadget development. Basically looking to provide an Inbox gadget and possibly a sending gadget as well. Progress has varied from week to week but i'm hoping that the next time i update you all on the how this is going i will have a working Google Desktop or Windows Live gadget. (Fingers Crossed!)

XNA: I've always been interested in games development and with Microsofts new games development SDK it's fairly simple to create games for both the PC and the XBox 360. I've started development of a breakout clone, something i once wrote in managed DirectX. Once i have a working version i'll find somewhere to host it and give you guys a download link!

I'll be updating roughly once a week, workload permitting and provided there's something worth saying.