Hello, I'm   Jason

I have confirmed with the philly.NET president, Bill Wolff, that I will be able to present on May 17th. My presentation will begin at roughly 7:00-7:30pm. The topic will be “Understanding Membership and Profiles in ASP.NET 2.0.” I’ve presented many similar …

One of the things that I really hate about technology is the fact that new technology is always coming out, but not soon enough. There is nothing better to say except that this really sucks! Perfect Example: We are in the process of building a process-oriented…

I was on the ASP.NET website earlier and saw the weekly poll asking visitors if they use unit tests in their ASP.NET applications. At the present time, over 40% of the visitors said ‘What are unit tests?’ In all but one of our applications, we are not …

What a great feature the OWA deleted items recovery console is for Exchange 2003. The fact that you can recover emails with just a click is awesome. The only issue that I see is that I think Administrators should allow or deny this access on a mailbox level. There are some users (such as basic users), who when terminated will just delete all of their email from the console as well thus forcing IT admin to restore email from backup if necessary.

I’m just catching up on some things today which is the reason for all the blogs. I came across an entry from one of the RSS feeds I subscribe to pointing me to a press release by Microsoft on April 19th. According to the press release, the Visual Studio Express editions (including Web Developer, SQL Express, etc), will be FREE forever! Furthermore, you can now develop applications to work with LEGOs. How cool is that? You can download the SDK for developing on LEGOs by clicking here.

Wow! I just realized how much material the ASP.NET team has posted on Atlas. There are videos demonstrating certain features of Atlas. There are blogs listing upcoming events, how-to’s, and upcoming features. Then there are the forums wher users and the ASP.NET team collaborate about Atlas. If you haven’t checked this stuff out yet, be sure to check it out soon. In addition, one of my good friends, Wally McClure (I guess I'll admit it), is soon releasing a book called ‘Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET.’ From what I hear, it should be pretty good.

Our old data center lost our .NET Valley database containing the list of email addresses that were part of our group. Unfortunately, they also had corrupt backup tapes as well. Since this issue, we switched data centers and I must say our new one is much, much better. However, we still do not have everyone’s email added to our list. If you are interested in being par of the .NET Valley User Group email list, be sure to sign-up by clicking here.

The next .NET Valley meeting will be held on Wednesday April 26th at Luzerne County Community College in building 7, room 703. The event will begin at 6pm.

Presenting for .NET Valley will be Chris Leeds, a local Microsoft MVP of FrontPage. Chris will be presenting ‘FrontPage 2003 Part 3 - Using FrontPage to Deploy a Shopping Cart.’ Chris will demonstrate just how easy it is to deploy an ASP (Active Server Page) and  MS Access driven shopping cart by leveraging some of FrontPage’s lesser known features. Chris will then follow-up by “skinning” the cart using FrontPage and CSS (Cascading StyleSheets).

Mikhail Arkhipov from the ASP.NET team has released a cool plug-in for VS 2005. His plug-in allows developers to check the spelling of words in their HTML and ASP.NET pages. To find out more about the plug-in and to download it, visit http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2006/04/17/577471.aspx. Thanks Mikhail!

I just enabled my RSS feeds listed on DotNetSlackers to auto-post entries from any of my 3 blogs to Community Credit. If you are not familiar with either, DotNetSlackers is a tool that ASP.NET developers can subscribe to (for free) to receive all of the latest news in the ASP.NET community in an email each day. Community Credit gives out “stupid prizes to smart people.” In other words, if you do lots of community work such as blogging, attending user group meetings, presenting, writing articles, etc, you have a really good chance to win some funny and cool tech prizes. If you’re not a member of either yet, be sure to sign-up today!