Over the past weekend and up to today, I've been reading up on the ASP.NET MVC framework and trying it out using Visual Studio 2008 at work, and marvelling at how nice it is, how nice the tools are, and how together Microsoft are about development compared with their attitudes just a few years ago.
It used to be a case of "do things our way or not at all!", but now it's "do things the proper way, here are some tools to help make it easier!"
After a long time battling with certain other technologies to try and do things in a well structured way [sideways glance at php], where you have to jump through firey hoops to get things done in a way that can best be described as a compromised and roundabout way of intending to do things properly, it's just... beautiful.
I feel like... I've been building houses out of toothpicks, and all of a sudden I get to design and build skyscrapers where they just get a crane and pick up entire staircases and slot them in. Y'know?
So I come home, have some dinner, talk on the phone, switch on my Xbox 360 and... hmm. I seem to have one of these. So I start swapping round AV cables... but later notice that because the red flashing lights were so bright, I had not noticed that only three of them were flashing, which means it's one of these.
So I went to the website, tried filling in a form to get it repaired... the website is a bit clunky and the area I live in isn't in the drop-down menu of counties so I am forced to select "England". That goes to an error page, which gives me some phone numbers.
"Oh..." I thought to myself. "I have been showing too much faith in Microsoft! There must be a god sitting somewhere on a cloud going 'see, you have been getting far too enthusiastic about Microsoft things today! I will show you the painful truth of how bad their systems are!'"
The phone number gives me an automatic machine to talk to, encouraging me to use the website. Argh!
Eventually I got to talk to a woman. She was so nice and friendly, and I had no trouble at all! I read out the serial number and some details, and she said the console was going to be repaired under warranty, and that they will pay to have it shipped to them, repaired and sent back, via UPS as a courier service. All for free. With a turnaround of probably 2 - 3 weeks. Plus they'd give me a new 90 day warranty and a month's gold Xbox live subscription as a bonus. I thanked her a lot and told her I was very impressed, and she was just really nice to talk to.
I am actually glad I got the infamous RROD error rather than the 4 light "your AV cable is broken" error, because I get it fixed for free rather than having to buy a new cable!
What can I say? My faith was tested and already it has been restored! XD
