I have always been very careful as to which sites I trust with my credit card. But unfortunately, working under stress to complete an assignment for my MBA, I gave out my CC number in order to signup for a 7 day trial account for the seemingly legit HighBeam.com. There was one article which was interested in and the site was preventing me from reading the rest without a membership. So I signed up, read the article, had the membership around for 2-3 days till I completed the assignment. Then I went ahead and canceled it. First time I tried, the site stopped responding. So, I refreshed the page went ahead and clicked on the Cancel Account button again. This time the site, logged me off and returned me to the general articles page. So, I assumed everything was fine.

Just yesterday, my Credit Card company called me up and informed me that HighBeam has billed me $199. I immediately informed them to block any other transactions from the card and went ahead and checked the account. And sure enough the account was active. They have not canceled the account, nor had they sent any emails informing the end of trial period was coming up. Worse yet, I have not received a mail informing me of the money they charged me. I have dealt with many companies over the Internet and it's standard practice of each to send out clear messages informing you before they proceed with routine billing.

A section of their help reads 'If you are not able to successfully use the online tool, please contact our 24-hour toll-free customer support line at 1-800-860-9227.' So they run this 'trial' acknowledging their online cancellation is failing at times?? Isn't that exactly why they should be sending emails before they bill trial users?

Little bit of Googling suggested that I'm not the only person who's been ripped off by this dodgy company.

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=highbeam

http://www.ripoffreport.com/searchresults.asp?q5=highbeam.com

More than two years ago, I was working on a highly experimental project called Project ZNIX. This was for my final year project for the Bachelor's degree in Information Technology. The project was like my baby; I loved it, nurtured it it and spent a lot of time on it. Whenever I could, I would slip the topic about it into day to day conversation so much so that it got annoying. But back then, nobody understood a lick about what the project "meant". With the exception of few elite professors who read the dissertation and listen to my presentation, everyone used to give me blank stares when I explained it. I had to explain the project twice, on two different days to the examiner in charge before he finally gave up and gave me an 'A'. I even wrote a CodeProject article about it: All that got me was pointless comment from a random looney. And while I was hell bent on following up the project after graduation, with a job to worry about the commitment simply faded away. And all that remains of that ambitious project is the initial articles and the specifications I wrote.

Well, today I'm proud to say that I've discovered Amazon is trying to do something very similar to ZNIX with it's SimpleDB. Of course, I'm not trying to claim that Amazon got the idea from ZNIX. But as an innovator, I'm simply glad that similar concepts are finally going main stream. Amazon's data model will undoubtedly generate lots of commercial interest. ZNIX on the other hand was project focused more on individuals and PIM needs. Mine was a dream to make personal computing more personal. I wanted to build a system where my mom or my 6yr old niece can use a computer without having to spend months learning it before hand. Hopefully, with SimpleDB I can keep that dream alive.

PS: I recommend that you check out Ralf's SimpleDB implementation.

This is just a note to say {smartassembly} (Professional Edition) has entered my development toolbox.

It all began with DotFuscator Community Edition flatly refusing to obfuscate our VSTO application. That got me searching for an affordable alternative. A good resources that I came across during the research is the How to Select Guide for .NET Obfuscators.

The article has since been updated and few of the obfuscators has been removed for some reason. However, the page led me to few products (including couple of free ones). These include,

• Aspose.Obfuscator
• Salamander .NET
• Spices.Obfuscator
• {SmartAssembly}
• .NET Reactor
• Skater.NET

Aspose and Skater did a blind obfuscation of the VSTO add in which ended up breaking the application. After bit of evaluating, I narrowed down the selection to .NET Reactor and {SmartAssembly}. The Reactor was cheaper and as a bonus contained an additional licensing library. Having already purchased a licensing component from  a different vendor,  this wasn't much of a selling point for us. However, at almost half the price of {SmartAssembly}, Reactor still was a good enough option.

{SmartAssembly} on the other hand came with a host of more valuable features including assembly optimization, merging, pruning and (get this) automated unhandled exception reporting. But, being the only developer who's charged with using the obfuscation tool, I had to discipline myself and get only what I need, nothing more. So the scales were tilting towards the Reactor at this point.

Then came an important consideration: how good is their customer support. From one of our previous purchases we had learned that sometimes this makes a huge difference. We had evaluated a product based on a limited set of requirements. The product handled these requirements well enough, and the price was about 10% of what the competitors were offering.

Few months after the purchase our requirements changed, requiring the product to handle an entirely different scenario. Theoretically, it had the required features to pull it off.  But, when it was actually put to the test, the product started to crumble. It was only after several weeks of frustrating email exchanges, bug reports and personally hacking some changes into their source code that I finally managed to make it work. Luckily for us, the developers of the product were quite responsive and did everything they could to get the necessary fixes out. I hate to imagine what would have happened otherwise.

So here's how I nailed down that Reactor was a risk and that {SmartAssembly} was the one to get:

Step 1:

Search Google for: <product name> review
.NET Reactor will return 195,000 results.
{SmartAssembly} returns 2,480 results.

But that's a worthless statistic. What you should look for are the sources of the link. You can browse through the multitude of results for Reactor and find that almost every single one of them are from 3rd party software download sites. The "review" they contain is only a repetition of the vendor's exact words.

Contrastingly, majority of the top hits for {SmartAssembly} are from some reputed blogs or developer resources sites (e.g. weblogs.asp.net, 4guysfromrolla). A simple search for {SmartAssembly} will also show you that it's been featured in the Scott Henselman's privileged list of Ultimate Developer tools.

Step 2:

Go to the vendor's online contact form and ask a simple question about the product or a feature. {SmartAssembly} got back to me on the very same day. I'm yet to hear from the Reactor guys :)

The point here is if they don't talk to you when you need to make up your mind about buying their product, they won't talk to you when you are stuck with a problem after paying.

So now, I have my copy of {SmartAssembly} to play with. I'm yet to put the product to it's full use, having only concerned myself with the obfuscation part of it. You can bet that there'll be more posts on this subjects in the coming weeks.

On a completely unrelated topic (related only in that it's something you should be aware of when purchasing over the Internet), take a look at the article on Software Awards Scam.

Few months ago, I ran into a seemingly devastating problem. I had initially started my official online presence with the domain codeofdefiance.com. At that time  the name meant something that kind of died off after a certain project was completed. So, I thought of moving on to this new domain (Codoxide.com). I purchased it and asked my service provider (PlanetSMB.com) to use it with my existing package. They of course, did exactly what I asked them to and planted Codoxide.com as my primary domain and CodeofDefiance.com as an alias to the same. 

As any self-respecting web master would do, I continued to monitor my new domain using Google Analytics and Web Master Tools, and of course the search. After a while, it became obvious that my new domain was not going to get indexed. If I ran a search for very specific keywords that had a high likelihood of hitting, say, www.codoxide.com/posts/pageA.aspx, Google would always show www.codeofdefiance.com/posts/pageA.aspx but not the former. For any experienced web master, problem here would have been obvious. Google had already developed it's relationship with my old domain. For all it knew, Codoxide was some obscure web site mirroring the content of an established site. And I hear, that's a pretty deadly sin in Google's eyes. Such a rookie mistake...

Well, a quick fix for this would have been to take down the old domain name and wait for search engines to pick up the new site. But then, I'd be starting back at zero, if I was to do that. The only good solution was to get search engines to understand that CodeOfDefiance will from then on be Codoxide!

301 To the Rescue

What I needed was to respond to each request for CodeOfDefiance with a "301 Permanent Redirect" response. I asked PlanetSMB whether they could do it. It turned out that they couldn't, which lead me to this workaround. For anybody that might find himself in this situation, here are the steps to follow (I did all this from my site's web admin panel PLESK):

1. Setup a new web application under your site. Let's say the virtual directory you picked was "/redirect"

2. Add a Default.aspx page to site and the following code to it:

3. Add an error.aspx page with the following code;

This will ensure that all previous bookmarks, links will point correctly to the new location.

4. And finally, the web.config file:

5. Go to your DNS server settings and configure it as follows:

And, that's it. Next time crawlers try to index your old domain they will be politely asked to look at the new site instead.

UPDATE: While it's not visible in the image above, the Address field in the Advanced DNS Settings point to http://<new domain>/<redirect folder>/Default.aspx.