Hello, I'm   Jason

Thanks to Julie Lerman, I now know of some material I can pass onto my User Group and students about Whidbey. I’ll post this on the Discussion Board of my User Group site, however, the link is here:

In the Fall of this year, I will begin a part-time teaching gig at a local college called Luzerne County Community College (www.luzerne.edu). In the fall, I will be teaching CIS 263, an Introduction to ASP.NET. The class will be on Monday nights from 6pm-8:55pm EST. If anyone is interested in learning more, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll try to post frequent updates in the blogs regarding this.

I would like to take the time to thank Scott and everyone else who worked on the blog admin site and the blogs in general. You guys did a phenomenal job on cleaning this up and getting this to work. Unfortunately I have been tied up with stuff to blog much, but I hope to be back soon! Congrats on the improvements!!!

I recently had two great speakers at my User Group. The first one started with Charles Carroll. He spoke about Data Access Layers, Web Services and the Utility Belt. He also gave away swag to the attending members. Then later this week I had invited Julie Lerman (in which her parents probably thanked me the most - lol) to speak to the group about streaming. That speech was absolutely phenomenal. We had a very small group for her speech, however, she tailored the speech to fit each of the individuals. She too gave away some swag.

The firm that I work at inventories all of the computers that come in. However, the inventory becomes outdated at times. So, I built in a small component into the inventory system that uses the NT “ping” command to find out if the machine is online, offline, or still exists. This is fairly inefficient as for speed, but we needed a tool to be setup rather quickly to find machines. So, I modified my MAC address web service to use “ping”. Then using the varied responses from the different operating systems, I was able to determine the status. If anyone is interested in the code, let me know and I’ll post what I used.

After reading a recent e-letter by SitePro News (www.sitepronews.com), it prompted me for this post regarding web site submission. Often, users submit web sites to search engines and they never are “spidered” or “indexed.” Hopefully with a few tips, this can all change.

This week I finished up my first Windows Server 2003 domain implementation. It was very interesting to see how 2003 differs from 2000. The biggest thing I noticed is security. At least on the surface, 2003 appears to be more secure. By default, everything is “turned-off” including allowing passwords that do not follow the new complexity rules. Passwords are not allowed unless they contain 1 upper-, 1 lower-, and 1 digit character as well as be 6 characters in length. Overall I thought the new security enhancements were a bit of a pain. I’m sure I’ll be thanking MS later for them!

I have been working on a downloadable and installable mail server. The mail server is based on a previous release given to me by Lumisoft, a development company oversees. The mail server will be available for beta testing sometime late next week. I finally fixed an issue I was having with the service installation and uninstallation. Actually, now that I have gotten to this point, I realized that the Win MSI I have created actually forces me to install and uninstall the service in a less clean manner. Anyway, for most Win Services, there are a few basic techniques you can use to install, uninstall, start, and stop the services. I have compiled these into a little utility in which I will post the link for download on this blog site in the next few days. In the meantime, a fellow blogger has helped explain the basics. Unfortunately, I was already past that point, but his insight will indeed help others in the future. You can read his suggestions by visiting the WindowsForms.com Forums.

I have been busy lately working on starting up a .Net User Group in my area. This has held me back from posting many blogs. Hopefully I will get back into the blogging sometime in the next 2 weeks or so.

One question I often get asked is “Where can I find web services?” Over the past few months, I’ve been searching around and have found a few good places to look: