Hello, I'm   Jason

I usually try not to blog about my favorite sports teams, but I just had to post about the ESPN Page 2 article titled “A tale of two empires”: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=bakay/050518.

During next weeks .NET Valley event, WindowsAdvice.com will be introduced to Northeastern Pennsylvania. Following a presentation about two of Microsoft’s most anticipated software releases ever (Visual Studio 2005 and MS SQL 2005), information regarding WindowsAdvice.com will be shown. The event will be held at Keystone College in LaPlume and will be sponsored by Microsoft. Click here for more information about the event.

On Wednesday, May 25th, .NET Valley and Keystone College will host an Introduction to Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2. The presenter will be our very own Jason N. Gaylord. For directions, please visit the >directions link on the website. Room information can also be found on the >directions page.

In a recent interview at VS!Live, Tom Rizzo, the director of product management for Microsoft SQL Server, answered some questions about SQL Reporting Services and SQL Server 2005. You can read the transcript here: http://www.ftponline.com/channels/database/2005_03/rizzo/.

As mentioned in an article written by Rick Westmoreland of AntiSource.com, Microsoft has decided to add a more robust security application to their library. I originally mentioned that Microsoft purchased Sybari awhile ago. Windows OneCare, the new application, will span system performance, PC maintenance, data protection and security in an “easy-to-manage” service (accdg to the Microsoft.com announcement). For more information specifically about this, visit http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/may05/05-13WindowsOneCarePR.asp.

Last night on MTV, XBox 360 was revealed to the world. I don’t want to take away from the new XBox, the technology, and the games, but I don’t think the show was really worth it. I think that MTV did a horrible job presenting the new system. Everything they showed (with the exception of the games) can be found at www.xbox360.com. The rest was simply fluff. For those of you who did see it, I’m sure you’d agree that all of the games looked fantastic. Kudos to Microsoft for taking the next step in the gaming world.

I have added my “AntiSource” articles to my website. You can check them out at http://www.jasongaylord.com/articles/?articletype=AntiSource. The articles I write on AntiSource.com include security issues and virus warnings. Some of the other authors have written reviews on hardware and software that pertains to viruses, security, logging, etc. If you’ve never visited the site, be sure to check it out!

ASP.NET 2.0 introduces a new section to the web.config file called ConnectionStrings. Some previous projects in ASP.NET 1.1 created this section so you may be familiar with it. This section allows users to add connection strings in their web.config for different data sources. An example of one using SqlExpress 2005 is shown below:

I had an issue this week binding a custom IList to a DataList. I struggled with this one because a was able to bind directly to a DataGrid. I knew that DataGrids bind differently than DataLists, but forgot what the difference was. They both look for an IEnumerable, however, DataGrids are more particular. Ambrose Little pointed out in an email that the DataGrid builds its own enumerator of type PagedDataSource.EnumeratorOnIList whereas the DataList is relying on a custom GetEnumerator function. I sent Teemu Keiski a copy of my code so he can act as a second pair of eyes (always a good thing). Luckily, he spotted that for some strange reason, I missed the Return keyword in my GetEnumerator function. I placed that in and everything works now. Thanks to everyone that helped me out. Hopefully if someone else runs into this foolish issue, this helps! ;)

I just finished reading a fairly decent article about maintaining your Windows Server 2003 boxes. You can find the article here: http://www.ftponline.com/channels/security/wss/2004_12/magazine/features/kgardinier/. There is a free registration to read the entire article.