Hello, I'm   Jason

As a reminder, the TECHbash 2005 event will be held tomorrow night, Wednesday November 30th, at Luzerne County Community College (Nanticoke, PA) in the Education Conference Center Building #10 room #132. If you have not yet registered for this event and plan to attend, please register at www.TECHbash.com/register. For more event information, visit http://www.techbash.com/events_view.aspx?eventID=1. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow night!

I just read a pretty good article on adding auto-suggest functionality to a website. The article can be found at http://www.travelope.com/DeveloperCorner/article/. I have implemented a 3rd party product called EasySearchASP.net, which contains similar functionality, on my website. For those of you interested in seeing a common use for AJAX, be sure to check it out.

Microsoft has setup a free 30-day, no obligation, ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 hosting service. This service is to demonstate the power of 2.0 and to show off some of the starter kits. To get started, you can visit http://www.vwdhosting.net.

I took some pics of the line outside Best Buy in Wilkes-Barre, PA on November 21, 2005 at about 5:10pm. At that point, these individuals were going to bear 30 degree temperatures with rain and wind for another 15-16 hours. Check out the pics here: http://www.jasongaylord.com/photos/Photos.aspx?AlbumID=113.

In case you missed a late post by Paul Glavich late last week, the ASP.NET team has released a Wiki built using the Atlas controls (an AJAX library provided by Microsoft). You can download it here.

I’ve been “offline” the past 4 days and just heard today that a great MVP and ASPInsider has passed on. Last week, Jim Ross died after battling sickness for many months. From what I’m told, his funeral was earlier today. As many have already mentioned, Jim will always be remembered. My heart goes out to his family in this time of mourning.

If you attended the Philadelphia launch event yesterday, then you already know it was a huge success. Kim Matlock did a remarkable job on this event, especially on the developer side. This was probably the best local event I’ve ever been to. It was cool to meet up with the other local user group leaders, such as Judy Calla (Harrisburg), Chris Waters (Allentown), and Bill Wolfe (Philadelphia). I also met some really cool people in the ATE area such as Bata (from the Team System Tools Team), Lenny Fenster (MS), Tim Edalatpour (MS), and Steve Mohr (Consultant).

Now that the Philly event is complete, its time to focus on the Wilkes-Barre / Scranton Pennsylvania launch event. This event will happen at .NET Valley’s TECHbash 2005 on November 30th beginning at 4:30pm. If you have not yet signed up for this event, please do so by visiting http://www.techbash.com/register.

We’ll see you there!

I’ll be one of the few “man-ing” the booth at the Philadelphia, PA launch event this Thursday, November 17th. Be sure to stop in and say hello!

As Scott Guthrie already detailed in his blog, the ASP.NET team has released a new add-in for VS.NET to make deploying web apps much easier. One of the coolest features in my opinion is the fact that you can replace sections of the web.config from debugging to release. So, I can modify my debug build options to replace the ConnectionStrings section of the web.config. The release build options can replace the same section with a “release-version” of the section. This makes testing and deploying much easier as now you don’t have to worry about forgetting if the web.config needs to be changed for testing, staging, or production. Great job guys!

Be sure to check out Mike Murphy’s IT Heros Podcast for the latest information about IT heros in the industry.