Hello, I'm   Jason

So today is the big day where my wife is being induced with our fourth child. Given the past, today’s experience should last between 6-10 hours. Knowing I’ll be hearing monitors in the background, I figured I should do some work. Since I haven’t spent the time to complete an app for Windows Phone yet I figured I would challenge myself. I’ll be live blogging this experience today and am up against mother nature. My goal is to see what comes first: my new baby boy or my new Windows Phone app. Wish me luck (on both fronts)!

On May 3rd, Wrox Press released Professional ASP.NET 4.5 in C# and VB. I co-authored this book with two Microsoft employees Pranav Rastogi and Scott Hanselman as well as two Microsoft MVPs Christian Wenz and Todd Miranda. The book is packed with the most current information about ASP.NET 4.5. It is also the only book I am aware of that explains One ASP.NET. The foreword for this book is written by Scott Hunter of the ASP.NET team.

Recently, we made the decision to change one of our Verizon Wireless plans. The plan was a family share plan that has existed for quite some time now. Both phones on the plan were “dumb” phones and the near $130 price point for up to 1400 minutes and no data seemed way too steep. When evaluating other Verizon Wireless plans, the price would increase even more for the two devices plus taxes.

Earlier today, the Webby Awards and Internet Explorer teams announced a joint project to showcase the Webby Award winners since the awards were handed out in 1997. This new website is built on Web standards which are truly emphasized in Internet Explorer 10. I’ll have a post in the future to highlight Web standards and the modern Web. However, if you’re too anxious to wait, feel free to check it out on the IE team’s Modern.IE website. In fact, the IE team seems to be so pumped up about the Webby Awards that they released an updated version of the Modern.IE website along with some cool offers such as a special offer for Mac developers.

This stemmed from a strange request that came across my desk. I had the need to pull a date 7 business days ago by using T-SQL in Microsoft SQL Server. Sounds simple right? Here’s the catch: the date had to be the 7th business day in the past after removing the days the individual was off.

One of the tasks that seem awkward in Windows 8 is the shutdown and restart process. One of my co-workers, Mark Beleski, had discovered a nice keyboard shortcut today. It’s nothing new, but something that I rarely used.

Tonight, February 9th, Microsoft is releasing their second tablet, the Surface Pro. Besides the Microsoft diehards, such as myself that will be ordering one within the first few minutes possible, I’m concerned that the masses are unaware. So, to solve my curiosity, I set out to see if I could find the answer for sure.

Yesterday, there have been numerous reports discussing the hard drive size of the Microsoft Surface Pro. I’ll be getting mine when they come out and will be getting the 128 GB size. Most of the world recognizes that 1 GB is 1024 MB and that 1 MB is 1024 KB and so on and so forth. But, in the hard drive manufacturer world, 1 KB is 1000 bytes. Strange right? Think about your last PC. Remember that 1 TB drive you though you had? Funny thing, it was actually just over 900 GB of useable space. There’s a great post that already calculated the math found at http://jasong.us/VmEBMW.

So I’m asked quite often who I use for hosting. There was a time when I hosted my own stuff and co-owned a small, regional hosting firm. In fact, at one point, I think we had nearly 50 business customers. However, time has passed and the hosting space became way too competitive for us. We didn’t have a multi-location infrastructure and the most complex load-balancing method we used was DNS load balancing. Even though we started to back off from business hosting, I still hosted my own site. That is, until one of my good friends, Brad Kingsley, had approached me about testing out a new service they were going to be providing.

So, it’s been just over a month since my last post. But, I haven’t been too quiet. In fact, I was hard at work customizing and updating one of my other websites, MyLightDisplay.com. Each year the holidays tend to consume any time I’d typically have to post or work on projects. This year, I have had two different projects that has had 90% of my focus and the other 10% went into our Christmas light display and MyLightDisplay.com. However, 2013 will be a bit different. I’ll be blogging more and will be in the community even more than I have been. I’ve got a couple of things I’ll be talking about shortly so stay tuned. In the meantime, thanks as always for stopping by and Happy New Year!