Ontem necessitei de fazer uma encomenda no site da FNAC, mas não foi propriamente fácil. Fiquei frustrado o suficiente para lhes enviar um e-mail para o Apoio a Clientes.
Bom dia.
Acabei agora de realizar uma encomenda na loja online, e há algumas coisas que não percebo. Primeiro tive bastantes dificuldades em realizar a encomenda devido a questões de usabilidade: Ao seleccionar como local de entrega uma loja FNAC, as caixas de texto para expedição (morada, código postal, etc) ficaram inactivas (o que é espectável). No entanto permaneceram com preenchimento obrigatório, o que me obrigou a mudar o local de entrega para "Morada", preencher tudo, e só aí escolher a loja para entrega…
Quando é aberto o formulário para expedição, no envio para morada apenas aparece a opção de recepção das 9 às 18 horas, só preenchendo os diversos campos aparece a opção das 19 às 22h. Ora além da falta de
transparência para o utilizador, ainda se arriscam a perder encomendas por falta desta informação. Finalmente no pagamento, é-me pedido o NIB, o qual copio da minha aplicação de e-banking e colo na caixa de texto.
Recebo uma mensagem de "NIB incorrecto" à qual não é anexada qualquer informação do formato esperado, depois de tirar espaços, o código do país e os digitos finais de checkdigit, lá consegui submeter o pedido.
Têm sorte que não desisti a meio. Por fim em vez de uma mensagem de "Compra efectuada com sucesso, vá ao seu e-mail" tenho o carrinho vazio, levando-me a pensar que tinha perdido o processo de encomenda.
Aconselhava seriamente a uma revisão da usabilidade do vosso site.
Com os melhores cumprimentos,
Bruno Silva
Foram simpáticos o suficiente para responderem a pedir desculpas e a dizerem que se encontravam com “problemas técnicos”… Era o que esperava, mas pelo menos despejei a frustração! 
Também achei curioso dizerem que estavam totalmente disponíveis para mais esclarecimentos, e de seguida me fecharem o ticket no sistema deles. lol
As promised, the public betas of the latest version of the Windows Live suite of PC applications are now available for download. Go to http://download.live.com/ and get the newest Messenger, Mail,Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Toolbar, and Family Safety.
in Windows Live Wire
So far I’ve only tested Windows Live Messenger, generally I like the new look. I love the "Favorites List" feature, since I already had a favorites group in previous versions of Windows Live Messenger. Another feature that may become useful: creating groups of users as a single contact. This way in a single click you can begin a conversation with multiple contacts, almost like a mailing list or a chat room channel.
Something I would like to change is the size of the avatars in the conversation window. It is pretty cool that now you can get a minimalistic conversation window if you hide the toolbar in the top and the avatars.
Make sure you restart your operating system after installing, because I was getting some strange window behavior previous to that. One feature that is a "little" buggy is the theme customization. You can try to change your windows color to black, but even if you set it as your default color, after restarting Windows Live Messenger it will be reset to the default blue, even the main window will get the default color…
Next step: keep on testing and try the other applications also.
This release represents the beta of Microsoft XNA Game Studio 3.0, which enables hobbyists, academics, and independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows and the Microsoft Zune digital media player using optimized cross-platform gaming libraries based on the .NET Framework.
The XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta is a chance to get an early look at XNA Game Studio 3.0, and provide feedback on the product that is currently in development.
in XNA Creators Club
Now it supports Zune with the 3.0 software version. The CTP version didn’t have support for XBOX 360 development, now it is fully supported Finally we can use Visual Studio 2008 for XBOX 360 development! Other features that please me are the Rich Presence support (that message in XBox Live that tells you what are your friends playing in the context of a game. eg: level, dificulty,etc.), and Invites for joining you in a multiplayer game.
Since I’m having trouble to get enough time to complete these post series (1 post was left), I’ll just leave you the source code.
It contains a sample of a WCF service that uses LINQ to SQL to retrieve some data from a SQL Server Database (AdventureWorks) and return it as XML. I’ve also some commented code in order to add a JSON endpoint.
Download Source Code
Previously I’ve written about how to create data charts using Silverlight. The data was coming from an static array, which is not that useful after all. Now lets see how to use data from an XML file. Bellow you can see an example of the XML file we’ll use. It is as simple as it can be, having pairs of labels and their associated value.
In your Silverlight project, if you try to open directly the XML file using something like XDocument.Load(”Data.xml”) Silverlight will try to find the file inside the XAP file. We could place the XML file inside the XAP file in order to make it work, but when we needed to update the file we would have to change the XAP file (replacing an XML file in a ZIP file)… Instead, we will use an external XML file. We must download the file using a WebClient (the download term applies: remember that Silverlight code runs in the client side, so while accessing you website resources you are accessing remote resources).
The download is asynchronous, so we need to create an event handler to be executed when the XML file download is completed. The XML file is downloaded as a string, so we need to parse it into a XDocument object, in order to manipulate it. The example bellow shows a little bit of LINQ to XML. LINQ (Language Integrated Query) allows you to query several data sources, including XML, Databases, Object collections, etc (even Amazon…). A nice tutorial about LINQ to XML can be found at Scott Guthrie’s blog.
We iterate through the data points present in the XML file and create a list of pairs containing the labels and respective values. After building the dataPoints list, the remaining code is similar to the code I’ve shown you in the Part 1 of these tutorials.
The next and final step will be to use a WCF web service to retrieve the data from an database in order to create a real dynamic chart powered by Silverlight.
Download Source Code
