Get your Free iPod - now in the UK

Some of you may have heard of these marketing schemes – they reward you for bringing customers to their sponsors by sending you free electrical goods. The more expensive the gadget, the more people you need to sign up.

It works like this – you sign up with the website, then you need to take up a sponsored offer. Once that is complete the website gives you a unique personal URL. All you then have to do is get 5 (more depending on the offer) people to sign up to the same thing and they send you the goods.

There’s even a gallery of people with their free stuff on the web site…

I’ve been keeping an interested eye on the schemes running in the states for a while now and they do seem to work. The good news is that they are now available in the UK.

Have a look, Free iPods

We've got some nice press in IT Training magazine

IT Training magazine interviewed Marie-Pierre Gouaux of Atos Origin and she had some nice things to say about us.

Amongst other things:

“By the end of April 2005, employees had used ESN to book 510 training courses for 1,500 employees – saving an estimated £250,000.”

Read the article.

Pretty Listing, Auto Indent and Statement Completion broken? - We have a fix!

Normally in Visual Studio .Net 2003 typing the start of a statement, such as Try and pressing Enter will result in the rest of the statement being completed for you, like this:

  373     Private Sub Testing()

  374         Try

  375 

  376         Catch ex As Exception

  377 

  378         End Try

  379     End Sub

However for the last few days this feature has been failing at random intervals. It’s pretty obvious when it stops as it’s such a time saver. Basically nothing happens, when you press Enter after a Try you get this instead:

 
  373     Private Sub Testing()

  374     Try

  375 

  376     End Sub

Restarting Visual Studio fixed it again for a while.

I did a search using Google for both websites and newsgroups, plenty of people with the problem, but no one had an answer.

So I called Microsoft and apparently,

“For the moment, I can’t really explain this issue because in our knowledge base there are many different cases where it can happen.”

They aren’t listed in the public Knowledge Base either…however we did eventually narrow my problem down…

…and the answer is…blank lines at the end of licenses.licx

Licenses.licx is used by 3rd party component suppliers to protect their work.

Removing the blank lines solved the problem – amazing but true.

The blank lines must be tripping up the VB.Net background compiler. It also made sense as it would stop working soon after I loaded a page with a 3rd party control on it into the IDE.

Microsoft were very efficient in solving this problem (thank you Rhanima!) – a very satisfactory result.