Could you test my first program

Conrad11 · 15 Oct 2006 at 20:24

Hi there,

This is my first program in VB.NET and well in any windows programming.

What it does is download the cinema listings from a website and create an XML file from them.

Could you test it out. Currently i ahve only set it up for a couple of cinemas.

Heres the link:

Click to Download

Tell me how i could improve it or if you get any errors.

Cheers.

zetec452 · 15 Oct 2006 at 20:35

This may be a silly q: How do I view the cinema listings?

Other than that everything works nicely.

meghatronic · 15 Oct 2006 at 20:47

Yeah as above....

Inquisitor · 15 Oct 2006 at 21:02

They're in the directory you installed it to, in a subfolder. Not the most user friendly way of doing things though

.

Perhaps you could add some kind of XML parser to display the listings on-screen?

Mr^B · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:00

Seems to have badly formed xml, looks like the " characters in the xml file are escaped:

Code:

A string literal was expected, but no opening quote character was found. Error processing resource 'file:///C:/Program File...

<?xml version=\"1.0\"?><rss version=\"2.0\">
--------------^

Haircut · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:11

A nice way to improve it would be to have a list of cinemas and the webpage to get the data for each one in a config file.
To add more cinemas all you would need to do is add an extra bit of config.

At present you would need to modify the code to add cinemas. Same if the webpage changes.

meghatronic · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:12

Can I just ask, from where are you getting your data?

Haircut · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:17

jdickerson said:
Can I just ask, from where are you getting your data?

He's getting the data from these websites:
http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/kingstonodeon.html
http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/suttonuci6.html
http://www.londonnet.co.uk/cinema/wimbledonodeon.html

and extracting the data from the HTML.

(Looked at the code through Reflector

)

Conrad11 · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:46

Mr^B said:
Seems to have badly formed xml, looks like the " characters in the xml file are escaped:

Code:

A string literal was expected, but no opening quote character was found. Error processing resource 'file:///C:/Program File... <?xml version=\"1.0\"?><rss version=\"2.0\"> --------------^

Yeah sorry about that

Conrad11 · 15 Oct 2006 at 22:46

Haircut said:
A nice way to improve it would be to have a list of cinemas and the webpage to get the data for each one in a config file.
To add more cinemas all you would need to do is add an extra bit of config.

At present you would need to modify the code to add cinemas. Same if the webpage changes.

Yeah, well it can do any of the cinemas on that site. Just need some more code to interperate other sites

This program was originally an addon for a different program which read the XML files and put the data in, but i will have something to show the listings too.