Indecision results in Netflix

For the last couple weeks, I've been torn about what to work on.

I got bored with the clan site. Once I worked through all of the MVC.NET stuff, I lost interest.

Last week, I went to a SOA / ESB conference. For several days, I thought about writing a .NET pubsub system.

I've also been thinking about writing a validation component. Every one I've seen (not many) requires tight coupling between the validator and the object being validated.

I've also been thinking about JTS, which is a pretty big piece of software that I wrote. (Muvico uses it). I started rewriting part of it in .net 3.5 with the intention of, perhaps, renting it out to other theater chains. I still might do that.

Then, I came back to DvdFriend. When all else fails, work on DvdFriend.

I added NETFLIX to the list of vendors. Unfortunately, it didn't play nicely with the existing vendor framework. Netflix requires you to be logged in in order to see the full product page. I had to put in a piece of custom code to handle that.

- changed the scraper to use httpwebrequest instead of webclient

- added a netflix hack to handle the netflix specific stuff. (The next time this happens, I'll have to refactor to an OOP friendly solution. This is just one, though, so no pattern yet. My goal was to implement netflix, not write tons of new code.

- Added a RentalOnly bit field to the vendor table.

- Changed the user control to show RENT when its a rental product.

- Much code is ignoring prices where the price <= 0. Rather than deal with that, set netflix to set the price to 999.00 (which never shows up anyway). Added a FIXED method to the parser to support this.

- Changed the save price stored procedure, for admin convenience. Normally, you would select a product type of RENTAL, then search for the product. Since DVD and BluRay is already there, the new check will make it a rental regardless of the selected product type.

I don't plan on backfilling all of the products, though I did go through most of products in the left and center columns. I'll probably do the right as well. Going forward, I'll keep up with it, and maybe do a few others here and there, but it won't be a big effort.

Now that the netflix product id is collected, the next logical step is "ADD TO QUEUE", and related.

After that... who knows. Amazon Unboxed? (Unlike netflix, I think Amazon Unboxed probably has a commission.

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