Hello, I'm   Jason

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!

Earlier this evening, I visited weather.com to find the following:

Windows 8 has done a great job with syncing settings across machines. So good in fact that you can even see what you’ve “purchased” from the Windows Store and what you’ve “purchased” that is not installed. I’m using the term “purchased” loosely as this infers that you’ve downloaded and includes free apps.

How many times have you wanted to drop a selection of Microsoft SQL Server tables that have begin with some common characters? I have many times especially when I’m testing certain web applications, such as Orchard CMS, and using different database prefix values to switch between instances. Thanks to Curt Hagenlocher over at a StackOverflow post, I now can.

First of all, thanks to all who are involved with the Microsoft MVP program for acknowledging the technical community. It is much appreciated.

One of the questions I’ve been getting asked lately at user group meetings, advisory board meetings, and lunch discussions about technology is “What startups are using Microsoft technology?” The perception is that building on top of the Microsoft stack costs money, much more than using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). Let’s see what Microsoft can offer as of today.

As ASP.NET evolves, using ASP.NET WebForms is still the most popular way to serve up ASP.NET. One of the biggest benefits of ASP.NET WebForms is the fact that we can use re-usable code in several ways including in a compiled server control. What you may not know is that server controls can be quite powerful and can allow referencing JavaScript files. But, if you’re distributing your controls or do not have the means to host your JavaScript files on a content delivery network (CDN), you may want to package the files with your control.