Hello, I'm   Jason

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.

Usually I try not to post about topics not pertaining to technology, but in the case, I think it was warranted. Before the US went to war with Iraq is 2003, gas prices in Northeastern Pennsylvania were around $1.69 - $1.79 and milk was around $2.59 a gallon. On my drive to work today, I noticed a gas station changing it’s price to $2.69 for gas. Just the other day I bought a gallon of milk for that same price. That means that in two years, when the rest of the US was going on a 3% inflation rate (according to inflationdata.com), gas prices started their 65%-70% rise. That seems to be a bit ridiculous. During the summer of 2003, gas prices were blamed on the war. In 2004, the same excuse was used. Last summer, gas prices were blamed on the amount of lumber being sent oversees to rebuild Irag and also the horrible weather in the US shutting down some oil refineries in the Gulf for days (weeks, months?). What’s the excuse this year? It can’t be because of the hard winter we had because in my opinion, it seemed as though we didn’t have winter. It can’t be because of the war because more and more troops are being pulled out. So what is it? I remember when I was in high school (just a short time ago) and I put in $5 of gas for the week. Now, $5 won’t last a day. When is this going to stop???

Yesterday I learned something new about IE. I read a post by Scott Guthrie talking about a cool new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 called App_Offline.htm. I already new about that feature, but I didn’t know something else he mentioned. If you create an error page that does not show at least 512 bytes, IE 6 will show the “friendly” error message that is built in. Interesting. Thanks Scott!

I needed a quick and easy way to consume RSS. Scott Guthrie let me know about a cool toolkit that Dmitry from his team setup. The toolkit can be downloaded from Dmitry’s blog or by visiting the Sandbox site on ASP.NET. I downloaded the toolkit and began using it. However, the RSS feed I was using was from a Linux installed forums application and although the posts placed the newest on top, the RSS feed did not. So, I needed to modify the code from Dmitry. With a few small modifications to allow an additional property in which I called ReverseItems, I was able to use the Reverse function of the generic type List to reverse the item collection in the control and return the items in reverse order. All I can say is good thing we have generics! :)

I just read somewhere that one of the features that FireFox 2.0 will include is an extension blacklist. The purpose is to help prevent attacks. Really, I see this as being a potential problem. That would seem to allow web compatibility issues to continue. If companies block JavaScript files in an attempt to stop JavaScript attacks, all JS would need to be inline. That would really sacrifice performance on an AJAX capable web app and also cause some browser caching issues. What do you think?

The ASP.NET team has streamlined the Atlas site. Check it out at http://atlas.asp.net/.

According to several resources including eWeek, the MIX 06 will introduce a “Go-Live” license for Atlas, Microsoft’s AJAX library. Other interesting technology is supposed to be announced and/or released at the conference. Stay tuned to Mix06.com for more details.

Microsoft has put together a pretty good series of videos, tutorials, and code for ASP.NET 2.0. You can access this material at http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/learning/learn/newtodevelopment/default.aspx.