Saw this over at peli's blog.  Reflector plugin.  Love saving keystokes.  Taking the weekend off, have to try it out Monday  :)

Check it out here

I was bummed when the DVD's were out of stock, and puerturbed when the dl site was just over run with other anxious people.  Thanks ms for putting up a link for this.  For those who haven't read about it yet WeRock is an end to end smart client sample.  I'm looking forward to diving into it.

Get the details here

Kimberly L Tripp has started blogging, and after reading some of her posts this is a great thing.  If you do anything with sql server, subscribe now.  NOW!  Or at least read this great post on sprocs.

Ordered Code Complete vol2 and Coder to Developer today.  No estimated delivery on Code Complete yet, but hopefully I'll have Coder to Developer for the weekend (bookpool is usually very fast for me).  Can't wait  :)

After reading Mike Gunderloy's post about his experience with Compaq, I was inclined to post up here too.  His post talks about a horrible experience he had when trying to receive out of warrantee (read : paid) support for a handheld.  After reading this, I reflected back on some past customer non-service experiences I had.  The point of all of this being, who the hell CAN we buy from?

< These are some short excerpts. For example, my issue list with Dell in the past is MUCH longer>

About 2 years ago I had an IBM hard drive die.  Those who know me know I'm a big fan of IBM, especially my ThinkPad.  Dealing with them about my in warrantee harddrive had to have been the worst experience I ever had with a tech support company.  In the end, I was out of a drive for 3 months before I got a replacement drive, that died a couple weeks later.  I never RMA'd the last drive out of frustration, even though I was the loser.  Customer service didn't give two ***** about my issue, had no advanced replacement, and never even replied to most of my inquiries.

About a year ago I was working on a mail server for a client.  It was a Dell Poweredge.  I contacted Dell on a Thursday looking for pre-sales support on extending the raid array, and to order the parts for overnight delivery (for upgrading over the weekend).  After 3 weeks, and 3 errors on Dell's part, we finally got the drives.  Again, "paid" service, incompetent support staff, horrible service, and in the end all the client saw was it took 3 weeks.

I can say I've had no issues personally with HP/Compaq, but know plenty of people that have.  Hearing this just re-iterates the fact that no one really cares.

So my and co-workers experiences tell me not to deal with IBM, HP/Compaq, or Dell for hardware.  Hmm.. the 3 biggest players..

And the story goes on.  I have horror stories with Sprint (mobile), Verizon (Dedicated Circuit's), SBC (this is a long list), Comcast, etc, etc.  So as well as tangible items, even the companies selling services don't seem to listen or care.

Well, in either case, I contest that customer service, for the most part, should be considered a luxury now.  As unfortunate as it is, its not required to be successful anymore.  Can we as consumers do anything?  Not that I can think of.  What are you going to do, not use SBC?  You will end up just using someone that uses their lines anyway.  Not buy an HP/IBM server?  Well, poor support for good hardware is still better then good support for bad hardware.  So we are pigeon holed into decisions to use companies that don't care.  I would even go so far as to contest that in some industries, you have no options for choosing a well supported product (think of phone service, or even mobile phone service (although I have heard good things about Nextel)). 

Now, I do have one shining star in my limited experience.  Geico.  After switching to Geico last year (you all expected the rate joke didn't you?), I was so amazingly surprised when someone answered their customer service line.  ANSWERED IT.  No recordings, no menus, a real person.  And to my shock and awe, a competent person.  They were able to help, without yelling, without escalation, and best of all within a few minutes.  Excellent service, and this year I did not even shop for insurance even though my rates went up a little.  It was well worth the extra cost.

So maybe this thread will spark the opposite.  How about we try to make a list of companies that DO serve the customer.  It will be a MUCH shorter list, and I would be very interested to see other companies that may have half of the interest geico has in its customers.

Larkware Compaq Story
Last installment of Cory Smith's sprintPCS horror story that I am watching closey.

 By the way.  Being a .net developer I of course have to voice in on MS.  Besides my licensing for professional's gripe, which I contest would be customer service, MS's service has been very good to me.  I have used support on many issues both on the admin, and the coding side.  They have ALWAYS been responsive and competent.  No geico, but much better then most I have dealt with.

The Scobelizer notes that ebay now has a few rss feeds.  Glad they finally came to the table.  I am a huge fan of ebay.  I buy everything on ebay if I can.  If only people would auction food.  Bought the car I drove to work, the laptop I'm typing this on, etc, etc, etc all on ebay. 

One thing I would love to see, though, are personalized feeds.  I would love to see my favorite searches come through in rss.  How about my watchlist in rss?  How about a general per user activty log so I could see all of my activty in 1 condensed view (and watch for actvity thats not mine) etc.  Anyone from ebay listening?  Anyone else think these have value?

After I finished listening to all the dot net rocks, I ended up having to listen to *gasp* music during my commute.  Although I do love music, I really like the idea of having something more constructive on my commute since I have more then enough time to listen to music at work.  I saw JospehCooney blog about ITConverstations, and think it might be time to give it a try.

IT Converstations
New Ideas Through Your Headphones

Not focused on .net, but there still seems to be some very valuable content.  I will down a few episoides and give an update next week.

I was part of a team that was tasked with CodeGen at work.  The intended goals were to gen as much as we could, staying within our coding standards, and utlizing as much of our common code as possible.  With these goals in mind, the research began.  After looking at a number of "turn key" gen tools (mostly O/R mappers), we realized that most, if not all of the turn key options required that we subscribe to their procedures.  This was not going to be sufficient since we had existing code and designs that we were looking to gen on top of.

So I started to look at CodeSmith as a possible option.  After putting together some prototypes of templates, I was pretty much able to get to the 50% mark on the entire CodeGen project in about 2 days.  After a few Aha! moments, I was cruising.  I still have quite a bit to do, but I have been amazed with how quick it was to learn, and how flexible it is. 

For example, we were in a position where we required some meta data to do some stuff in the gen.  CodeSmith doesn't have a native way to go and grab a value from an XML file that I could find, but it really didn't matter.  I simply created a code behind file with a wrapper around some XPath, and was grabbing values in about 15 minutes.  Fantastic.

I know CodeSmith is old news to alot of people, but if you haven't given it a try yet, your only hurting yourself.  Think of it as asp.net, but it will render code instead of html.  Very flexible and easy.  Thanks Eric for a fantastic product.

Check out CodeSmith here, and Eric's blog here.

Here is a relativley new blog (about a week and a half old) from Major Nelson.  He is the Xbox live director of programming. 

I would love to see more xbox blogs, probably since I just got mine  :)  This is the only one I am subscribed to now, anyone have any others?

Put in my order for Coding Slave.  I am really looking forward to reading this.  If you haven't heard of it yet, check it out here.  The reviews have been very, very good.

Identity theft is something that I worry about more and more, and from what I read rightfully so.  I also have my own reservations about how the credit industry works.  Going through a martgage application process, I see how in many ways the credit system is there to serve the creditors, and not the consumer.  Those gripes will be for a later time, though.  Keith Brown blogs about identity theft, and some basic steps that you can take to help protect yourself.  I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that thinks 10$ a month is ridiculous for "protection".  The steps are all pretty basic, but it's good to see that we follow most of them in our household.

1 ) I do religiously. 
2) We don't have a locking mailbox (and can't in our complex), but all outbound mail goes directly to the post office. 
3 and 4) I am always leary giving out my ssn.  I will def adopt the practice of asking for a persons name.  Good suggestion.
5) We use the two hand method, but get the same results.  Will get a shredder soon.
6) I learned it by watching them.  Thanks  :)
7) Goats are loud, can I sacrafice a mouse instead?

Yesterday I was sitting in codesmith reviewing some samples, and out of no where I had a systray dialog about upgrading my Macromedia flash.  Although I appreciate Macromedia's interest in keeping me up to date, I immedieatly started looking for this rouge set of code looking for new versions.  Process explorer showed nothing even related to macromedia, so I put it to bed for the day.

Now today I am looking through more codesmith stuff online (yes, I was tasked with code gen  :)  and it occured to me the route code must be right in IE.  I started to look around my IE and I find all kinds of stuff that isn't microsoft's (partypoker, adobe, rssbandit, even sun).  So I start to think about how IE could be doing all kinds of stuff in the background that I don't even know, since I really don't have a handle on the plugin's in IE. 

A quick search turned up nothing that addresses this.  Has anyone seen an app that lets you see everything IE is loading, and maybe even disable those plugins?  Something like msconfig for IE?  If not, anyone else see the need for an app like this?

UPDATE

Robert W. McLaws mentioned xp sp2 in the comments, took a look, and there it is.  Exactly what I was looking for.  Heres some screenshots.

As you may know, I am a big fan of .net rocks.  Carl and Rory released the new dnr from teched, and well this may just be one of the best episodes yet.  I have been reading the blogs throughout teched and am very excited about all the new things, but reading the blogs doesn't compare to listening to the interviews.  You may not get the depth of info in the mini interviews, but it really makes you feel more connected to the conference by hearing some of the converstations.   I really enjoed the cabana talk with Bob Resleman, and now I really wish I had made it to the local thing Rory had with Bob when he was in town.  If you don't listen to .net rocks, do it, now, what are you waiting for?  If you do, make sure to catch this epsiode. 

Oh, and I can hardly contain myself waiting for the movie  :)

New version of cruisecontrol.net was released yesterday.  (0.6.1)

Download Here
Release Notes Here

Over the long weekend I got to play some games, and relax.  For those that play poker online, I wanted to find out where you play.  I have typically played at partypoker, but SS told me about truepoker, so I gave it a shot.  Truepoker is def worth the download.  I really like the view when your playing, and the fact you can see when others are looking at their cards.  The tourney's are all very big, though, so I can only imagine how long they take.  Make some single table tourney's, and I may ditch partypoker all together. 

Also spent time with ssx3 and top spin.  Man top spin is a fantastic game.

Barry Gervin posted a link to download a bunch of technet content.  I count 154 files filled with what looks like some killer hidden gems.  Check it out here.

This is something we have known we would need to look into, but have been pushing it off for now.  Looks like we may have pushed it off just enough.  Here, Scott Colestock speaks to using nant with biztalk. 

Last night a developer added a lib to the project and accidentilly checked it in.  Of course there was no dll on the build machine, and the build failed.  I looked at the ccnet email and site, and saw the build failed, but no details.  I started to comb through the xml file, and relaized that compile.xsl was not catching anything in the <builderror><message>, just what was in <buildresults><message> where the word error or warning appears (' error', and ' warning' in my edited xsl). 

I made a simple change to the xsl and now we are displaying these errors too.  Change is below.  I think ccnet needs a central place to handle xsl's, though, since every change I make to the xsl needs to be made in 4 places at this point  :)

<xsl:variable name="error.messages" select="(/cruisecontrol//buildresults//message[(contains(text(), ' error') and not (contains(text(), '0 error')))]) | (//builderror//message) " />