Followers of the IHttpHandler

Infacta & GroupMail: They Suck Big Time

I wanted to post this to alert other people about this company.

I brought GroupMail Business Edition for $299 several months ago, it was version v5.2.0.54 then. I never got a chance to use it until now, so I headed to the Infacta website to download the bits and I found a funny:

"Your access has expired, you need to purchase extended protection to keep access"

Expired? My access?

So I got the support page and tried contacted Infacta through one those ugly designed web-based Contact Form, needless to say I never received a reponse back.

I then decided a phone call should work better so I looked up Infacta's telephone number in the US 1-866-641-8281.

A nice lady gently told me that the person who could help me was OOF until the next day. Not a problem, I already wasted some time here, but I can wait one more day.

Another phone call, and... the same story again "this person is OOF". Ok... I will call tomorrow...

Needless to say, my 3rd call didn't have any luck, they guy was still not there. And what got me a little bit more upset was a "He usually work only in the mornings" (why in the world I wasn't told about this before?)

With the last traces of patience I was left with I said: "Ok, I only need a simple download location, this couldn't be that hard, there should be other people knowing where I can download this from".

No luck again, "I'm only a receptionist" and "there is only one person from Infacta working here" were the two sentences that killed my last hopes.

Almost I week lost... let's email them now... which I should have probably done so to begin with but one would think a quick phone call should do faster...

A funny guy from sales responds to my query indicating that "You need to pay $85/year for a protection upgrade to get your download link restored. This is because you have v5.2.0.54 and current version is v5.2.0.65"

What?!?! C'mon... I don't want any freaking upgrades nor protection, I'm asking only for exactly the same freaking installer corresponding to the version I purchased months ago".

You want to charge me a couple of bucks for a download as a "media" reposition, ok good go ahead, I will still feel you're ripping me off... but $85/year... to get access to the freaking bits I already purchased...

Bottom-line of the story: if you're ever brave enough to do business with Infacta just make sure you do download the bits you're purchasing ASAP otherwise they will attempt to rip you off selling additional upgrade-protection-whatever you don't need nor want.

T4 Editor v1.0 RTM finally available!

After lots and lots of hard work I'm very proud to announce that my team shipped v1.0 of the Clarius T4 Editor today.

We've been insanely struggling to get the bits finished during the last few months; you know, extending Visual Studio for simple stuff is far from trivial let alone extending it in some crazy ways like reusing the existing C# infrastructure. Nothing but lots of "fun"...

I've received lots of pings from people asking how the editor will be available, so this is the story:

We're offering a Community edition, featuring basic T4 IntelliSense and syntax coloring, for free as in beer. And we're offering a paid Professional edition too, including a few more extra features plus our King feature which is support for embedded C# code blocks. If you're interested into finding how these two editions compare you can find a summary here.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I'm trying to save some typing by using this picture:

Now imagine how much your productivity will improve and what are you going to do with all the time you will save thanks to using the T4 Editor. :)