Blog by Joel Fjordén a.k.a. Will o Wisp

Sony Sucks When It Comes to Support and Guarantee for Playstation 3

Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 11:41 AM - General

I write this to inform you all about my experiences with the horrible Sony support in Sweden. It all started when the blueray drive in my one year old PS3 (40 Gb) stopped reading blueray discs, games and movies. I then contacted the support in order to try to get it fixed, guarantee or no guarantee. After some phone calls, which by the way cost about 1$ per minute, and a lot of e-mails, I understood that they were not interested in trying to find a solution, and I was told that a simple diagnose would probably cost more than a new console. I know for sure what the problem is, so why not simply exchange the drive or let me buy it as a replacement part so that I could replace it myself?!

The problem with the blueray drive is so very common, that I really think Sony should extend the guarantee period for these units, or at least try to be a little more professional in handling these issues. If you google for this problem you will find hundreds of hits in forums and YouTube also has an insane number of videos where people show you how to try to fix it or exchange it.

This blog article, that describes my experiences with Sony in more detail, is unfortunately in Swedish, but I guess you can always use a translation tool if you're interested in reading more about it.

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DevConnections Is Coming Up

Thursday, November 1, 2007, 06:17 PM - General

It's time for DevConnections, Las Vegas, in the next week, chaired by Juval Löwy and Carl Franklin. Juval Löwy, from IDesign, is the man behind the C# code standard used by Code Style Enforcer, as default rules.

I'm really looking forward to this conference and to Las Vegas of course. We are about eight people from here, coming from different companies, who are attending the conference. We're leaving this Saturday and will stay for a little over a week, so hopefullt we'll experience more than just the conference, e.g. Las Vegas night life, Grand Canyon, etc.

So if any of you are going there, we might bump in to each other :)!

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Custom Actions and Upgrade Installations Cause Problems

Sunday, March 11, 2007, 06:21 PM - General

I ran into this problem when making an upgrade installation of Code Style Enforcer. The problem is that Code Style Enforcer uses custom install/uninstall actions in order to locate and ensure that the correct DXCore version is installed, among other things.

When doing an upgrade installation, the old custom actions assembly is first loaded, into the AppDomain, in order to call the uninstall method for the version currently installed. When it’s time for the Install method to be called in the new Custom Actions assembly, it still uses the old assembly since that is already loaded into the AppDomain. This has to do with how the Assembly.LoadFrom method works. This is really bad, not only since the new and perhaps updated Install method won’t be called, but since the old one will execute instead.

Microsoft suggests signing the Custom Actions assembly with a strong name in order to solve the problem, but I’ve tried that without any success. Another solution might be giving the assembly different names for each new installer version, but this seems like a really ugly solution to me.

For more information about this have a look at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555184
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906766

I’m really not sure if this problem is entirely bound to setup projects in Visual Studio and the Uninstall and Install/Commit custom actions implemented as part of an Installer class. I will try to migrate my setup project to WiX instead and see if I can get it work as expected.

For the interested, the Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. I will tell you more about it in another blog post.

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Attending Tech-Ed Barcelona

Wednesday, November 1, 2006, 06:43 PM - General

On Saturday I am heading down to Barcelona for some vacation, but mainly for the Tech-Ed Developers Conference. I am really looking forward to attend some mind-blowing sessions, who knows maybe I will see some of you there...

When I get back in about two weeks from now, I hope there will be a new version of DXCore available, so that we can get the last few things in to the upcoming version of Code Style Enforcer.

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Course in Windows Communication Foundation

Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 06:30 PM - General

I am currently away attending the WCF Master Class with Juval Löwy, from IDesign, who actually is the man behind the C# Coding Standard that we base our default code rules on. I can truly recommend this course to anyone who wants to deepen their knowledge in the future of .NET development, which by the way is already here!

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