Hello, I'm   Jason

Adobe MAX, the Creativity Conference, will take place virtually from October 20-22, 2020. With over 50 hours and 350 sessions of continuous live content, you’ll hear keynotes, have celebrity appearances, and musical performances. You’ll hear from Shantanu Narayen, President and CEO of Adobe, Scott Belsky, EVP of Creative Cloud, Ava DuVernay, Annie Leibovitz, Keanu Reeves, Tyler the Creator, and many more! To register for the event, visit jasong.us/2PXHpFe.

Unfortunately, there is yet another developer and technology conference that has been cancelled as a result of COVID-19. CodeMash, which has existed since 2007, has never been cancelled until now. CodeMash 2021 would have taken place at the Kalahari Resort & Convention Center in Sandusky, Ohio January 12-15, 2021. Instead, the Kalahari conference rooms will be empty.

While we all wait for Amazon to pick a day in the fall for Prime Day, you don’t have to wait for great deals over at Amazon on their Alexa-enabled devices. Amazon is currently running a sale on over 50 of their devices including Echo Dot, Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle, Echo Auto, Ring, and more! Many of the deals are just as good as you would expect on Prime Day and/or during the holiday season.

Two years ago, I replaced our door lock with a new Schlage Connect Smart Deadbolt lock. Schlage is just one company that offers Z-Wave locks. At the time, I purchased a Samsung Smartthings hub as it was one of the only ways to integrate the door lock with Amazon Alexa.

Earlier this year, Microsoft decided to move all conferences through June 2021 to virtual events. Microsoft Ignite is no different. This year will be the first ever, fully digital Microsoft Ignite. Microsoft opted for an earlier time frame and will host Ignite on September 22-24, 2020.

As Mads announced back in May, C# 9.0 is taking shape. While he shared some really good examples for each of the new and upcoming features, the team recently released full proposed specs for each of the features.

Microsoft announced the release date and price for the Surface Duo yesterday. The Surface Duo has a 5.6” (3:2) screen when closed in single screen mode and an 8.1” (4:3) screen when fully opened in dual screen mode. The unlocked device is available for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless in the US. The device boasts an all-day battery, USB-C, 11MP adaptive camera with 4k video recording, and a Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 855 Mobile Platform processor. It also includes 6GB DRAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal storage.

GitHub has published their roadmap for GitHub.com and GitHub services. You can see what’s upcoming through the first quarter of 2021 and beyond by visiting github.com/github/roadmap/projects/1. I think I was most surprised not to see a migration from GitHub Pages to Azure Static Web Apps. GitHub is definitely looking to continue to expand what’s available in GitHub Actions by enabling them for GitHub Enterprise Server and also for private repositories.

Since Microsoft switched Microsoft Edge to use Chromium, they are releasing nearly every 6 weeks and have aligned both Beta and Stable major releases with the related Chromium release. So, version 85 will be released the week of August 27, 2020. They have the release schedule through version 89 (week of 3/4/2021) published at docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployEdge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule.

It’s hard to believe but when I started posting back on April 11, 2003, I would have never expected that I’d have 1000 posts ever, let alone in less than 20 years! Over the years my posts have varied from web and application development to system administration and security. They’ve also included sports, business, and personal related posts. Back then I rolled my own site completely in .NET and using Microsoft SQL Server: