Hello, I'm   Jason

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!

Scott Guthrie announced that his team has released the ASP.NET 2.0 provider source code. This is very cool stuff especially if you want to see what they did for providers such as profile, membership, etc. Thanks for posting that Scott!

In case you have not heard yet (as I tend to find out about things a bit late thanks to the amount of email I get), the Atlas Control Toolkit has been released and is up for download on the ASP.NET website. You can download the toolkit at http://atlas.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47&subtabid;=477. The toolkit includes some cool controls such as a Collabsable Panel, HoverMenu, PopupControl, and more. Full demos of each control are also available on the site.

If you live within 60 miles of Wilkes-Barre, PA, be sure to visit our user group splash page at DotNetValley.com to sign-up for our user group newsletter each month.

Welcome to the new ASPInsiders website. Be sure to let us know what you think.