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Books & Articles I wrote.

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

 

Windows Workflow Issues

Sam Gentile posts about potential issues with the sept RC of WF. I've not ran into any issues yet, but be aware this may happen and save your entire Saturday afternoons! Some upcoming stuff from the guys at Redmond:

26-Oct
Live From Redmond: An In-depth Look at UpdatePanel
Kashif Alam
link
2-Nov
Live From Redmond: Enriching Existing ASP.NET Applications with ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions
Richard Ersek
link
9-Nov
Live From Redmond: Introducing the Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit
Joe Stagner
link
16-Nov
Live From Redmond: Building your own Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX control extender.
Joe Stagner
link
21-Nov
Live From Redmond: Using the Microsoft AJAX Library with “other” server technologies.
Joe Stagner
link
30-Nov
Live From Redmond: Microsoft AJAX Patterns - Implementing Predictive Fetch with Microsoft AJAX
Joe Stagner
link
8-Dec
Live From Redmond: An in-depth look at the "ListView" control
Kashif Alam
link
12-Dec
Live From Redmond: Team development on web applications
Jim Bresler
link

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Opodo Nonsense

With our second baby due this Christmas last night we booked flights for my wifes parents to come over from Chile to spend some time in the UK. After some looking around we go some decent prices at Opodo, booked them and after many failed attempts to get their paper ticket version working, we just booked the physical tickets. It was "very easy" accoring to their sales guy on the phone who had clearly never actually done so.

It was a little while later that i realised no insurance had been offered with the flight. I called them only to be told that "insurance isn't offered when your origin is outside the UK" and that "I " ... couldn't expect the system to work out that i was coming from outside the UK".

I can only imagine that a label indicating that your selected location was NOT the UK would't be beyond the souls that built the system - i even pointed out to her the fact that it displayed in a large orange box that there IS travel insurance for flights originating in the UK and that if the system can handle that, then the reverse isn't surely too tricky (the "else" part of the statement i'd hazard a guess).

She then started rambling on about reading the detailed terms and conditions, and mentioning that only important things can be placed on the front screen. Hands up who finds lack of flight and medical insurance to a country 2000 miles away a side issue??

The crazy thing is that she is saying it is MY fault even though we spent a reasonable amount of time booking. Sure, there are specific things in the T&C's you have to be aware of, but as a service provider and more importantly a company who would have possibly got repeat business from me, the fact that a fairly serious piece of information was glossed over and not even indicated by the system (or in fact by the rep on the phone earlier in the day) goes to show how bad services seem to be these days.

The response should be "Yes, we see that could be missed and we will look at putting a message to indicate there is no insurance with a link to possible 3rd party providers of your insurance".

The net result is that they are now way down on the list of companies i will any of my future trips with.

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