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Thursday, December 24, 2009

Microsoft E-Learning new for MSDN subscribers

MSDN subscribers are supposed to get free e-learning; one or two collections. I just found out about this today so I tried to sign up. It says I'm eligible for 2 collections, but wouldn't allow me to sign up for them.

The first screen says: "MSDN Premium Subscriber: Please select up to two of the listed Microsoft Learning E-Learning Collections and press the Submit button below. Note: You must select both collections at the same time. If you are not ready to make your selection now please close the browser so that you may return to this Product Selection Page via the MSDN Subscription site on a subsequent visit."

Below that is a list of products with checkboxes next to them. So I checked two items and clicked Submit and then I got this error; it said I selected the incorrect number of products:






so I tried submitting with only one checkbox selected and got the same message; incorrect number of products selected

so I tried selecting three checkboxes and got another error; the maximum allowed is two






Maybe it is going to make me wait until after the first of the year, not sure. I hope I can sign up eventually.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Unvalidated Input

I was looking at old bug reports the other day and thinking about the kinds of bugs I find. Unvalidated input has been a common source of bugs. The program doesn't check if the values entered by the user is within the expected range.

I know there isn't an easy answer for these kinds of errors, but wondered how it will be solved in the future. The only half decent answer I thought of was to stop letting users enter whatever they want. For example if they are entering their phone number only accept digits and ignore anything else. Or some type of keyboard or input system that knows which values are on the good list.

Until then I will continue entering letters in numeric fields and reporting the same type of bugs.