Hello, I'm   Jason

MSN is now joining Yahoo! and Google in announcing that their search tool will be able to soon search published book content. MSN joined the Open Content Alliance yesterday announcing that they will “bring millions of publicly available print materials worldwide to the Web.” For more information, visit the official announcement here.

The next .NET Valley meeting will be tonight at LCCC in Nanticoke, PA. For more information about the event and for a link to sign-up for the event, visit www.DotNetValley.com

In this podcast, Wally continues on with his rants about Atlas. You can download this podcast by visiting http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym/archive/2005/10/21/428126.aspx.

SIGN-UP

This event will be held at Luzerne County Community College, Nanticoke on October 26th, 2005. For directions to the facility and for room information, click here. The event will begin at 6:00pm. Here is the schedule:

6:00pm Open Forum

I came across a post on Barry Gervin’s blog (a Solutions Architect MVP) that MSN Search now supports Algebraic expressions. That’s pretty cool. I can just see some students now trying to cheat in Algebra class. Go ahead and try it. Type in (x*2)^3=1000. You should receive x=5.

I read a post last week by Steve Smith about DotNetSlackers. It’s pretty cool. All you have to do is create a profile and choose receive newsletter. Once you create a profile, click on Email Service in the profile menu. Choose the technologies you’d like to receive blog entries on. Then, you’ll receive an email in your inbox that appears similar to this:

All Microsoft Office “12” applications will have the ability to save documents as PDFs. You can find out more specific details about this feature by visiting Cyndy Wessling’s blog. Cyndy is the Program Manager on the Office team and her team is the one working on this feature.

Repost of Q&A from Cyndy’s Blog on 10/13/2005:

Is this a one-way publish only, or do we support opening and editing PDFs as well?

Save as PDF is a one-way “publish” operation only. We are neither shipping a special viewer nor doing any work to make PDF files readable or editable by the Office applications.

**Why is this built directly into Office as opposed to a print driver available to all applications?

**Because this functionality is native to Office applications, we can capture richer document data further upstream than we would be able to do with a print driver. For example, we annotate our PDF output with tags for accessibility and we support internal and external hyperlinks. An additional advantage to capturing document data further upstream is that we render some visual effects, such as transparency and gradients, better because we are working with native information that has not been converted to bitmap for printer output.

**Do we support tagged PDF (for accessibility)?

**Yes, Office PDF output contains tags to assist with reading order for screen readers, and alternative text on images and on rasterized (bitmapped) text (to avoid interrupted text flow when portions of a text run are rasterized due to text effects or other document constructions). We also tag documents and, in some cases, text runs with language tags to assist with accurate pronunciation, and we export Unicode text for nonstandard glyphs to enable screen readers to access the actual text content. I appreciate the feedback we have received in this area as to what tags people would like to see implemented.

**What choices were made with font embedding/subsetting/outlining?

**For our Standard intent, we both embed and subset embeddable fonts (when permitted). For our Minimum Size intent, we do not embed “Web safe” fonts, but we do embed and subset all other embeddable fonts. We are not doing font outlining in the general case.

**Do you support automatic bookmarking?

**Yes, document structure is implemented for some applications to support bookmark navigation in PDF viewers. In Word, for example, you have the option to generate bookmarks by page, by heading, or by Word bookmarks.

The 22nd ASP.NET podcast has now been posted by Wally. The show includes a summary of Spang, the MVP and ASPInsider Summits, and an introduction to Atlas. To download the show, click here. For the entire list of show notes, click here.

I’ve finally posted some pictures from the NJ Code Camp this weekend in Edison/Iselin, NJ. You can check them out by visiting http://www.jasongaylord.com/photos/Photos.aspx?AlbumID=104. Also, the .NET Rocks show was posted to the website. You can check that out by visiting http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=141.

Don Demsak (DonXML) and Scott Watermasysk (ScottW) did an awesome job putting together the NJCodeCamp. For my 9:00am session on Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0, I’m proud to say that we had “standing room only.” For my 10:15am session on Membership and Role Management in ASP.NET 2.0, we moved to a room 2-3 times the size of our earlier room and it was probably 80-90% filled. I stayed around for a bit and saw that many of the other sessions were packed in as well. Thanks to both Don and Scott for inviting me to come and present. I have pictures I’ll be posting very soon.