One of the challenges of registering on this site is the verification process. You must register a valid email address in order to receive the verification code, which is required in order to gain entry to the downloads page.

Now, because this process is rooted in email, there are a number of reasons why you may not receive the verification code:

1. The email address is invalid ('test@test.com' seems to be a common attempt).
2. You had a typo in your email address (this happens surprisingly often).
3. Your ISP has overly-aggressive spam filtering, and incorrectly identifies the verification email as spam.
4. Your inbox is full, so your ISP rejects any additional emails.
5. Your email address is valid, but my email server cannot resolve your domain.

Now, in the first two cases, we make reasonable attempts to determine if the address is bogus or just misspelled, and resend the email. If the address is totally bogus, it will automatically be deleted after 30 days (as are all unverified accounts).

Cases 3 and 4 require action on your part, and so we must rely on you to resolve the issue and then return to the site and request the password reminder, which will resend the verification code. There is nothing we can do to intervene in the process.

Case 5 is a special case, and we have a couple of users that fall into this category. When we get the email delivery failures, the first thing we do is try to send the registration email from our corporate GMail or Hotmail account, to see if those servers have the same problem. If the delivery fails from those accounts, we really have no recourse. We cannot contact the user, and they are unable to get into the site. They register, try the password reminder, re-register, etc. and they are just never able to successfully complete the process.

So our advice is this, if you are having trouble getting registered (and you never seem to get the verification or password reminder email), then odds are you fall into Case 5. The easiest way to solve this problem is to use a different email account for the registration. Go get yourself a free Hotmail, Yahoo or GMail account and use that for the registration. Additionally, you can contact us directly using the contact form on this site, and we will attempt to assist you as needed.

One final word about those emails (and giving us your email address in general), we do not and will not swamp your inbox with emails. Generally speaking, the emails we do send are limited to product release announcements and other things of a major nature (to date, I think there have been a total of 2 emails). As we ourselves conduct a great deal of business using email, we understand that you don't want to sift through a mountain of erroneous email, even if you requested it. We respect your decision to give us your email address, and we will do our best to make sure that trust is not abused.

If you have any questions, see our Privacy Statement, or contact us directly.

And the best way to keep track of EasyObjects developments is to monitor this blog using an RSS reader, a Firefox live bookmark, or if you are really adventurous, IE7 Beta 2. Everything that happens with EO is announced here first.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...  :)

Congratulations to our contest winners!

• Mehmet Ozdemir
• Tim Mather
• Eugene Van Rooyen
• David Moody
• Vidar Markussen
• Rick Gibson

The reference of "Signs and Portents" is from one of my all-time favorite sci-fi shows, Babylon 5. It was the overall title of Season 1 and gave the show it's initial feel and direction, as I believe my blog posting has done for EasyObjects.

If you are a sci-fi fan and never saw the initial five seasons (I'm not aware of any US outlets that are still airing the episodes, even the SciFi channel, but I think it is still running in the UK), I would urge you to check it out. All 5 seasons are available on DVD.

I am currently at work on setting up the store so people will be able to purchase the modules, so stay tuned.

Update: Due to a clerical error on our part, Rick Gibson submitted a winning entry but was left out of the winner's list. The only fair resolution is to award a free copy to Mr. Gibson, thus giving us six winnners in total. We regret the error and sincerely apologize to Mr. Gibson for any inconvenience.

Since there were no real big changes to the business entities in 2.0 (really just the switch from DBCommandWrapper to DbCommand), and the current code base is pretty stable, I went ahead and updated the VB code templates for 2.0. If you download the latest version of the CTP, you will get updates for the VB Quickstarts and templates and also the updated EasyObjects project file with the Configuration code removed (so as not to confuse any more people).

The contest lines are still open...