Hello, I'm   Jason

We are in the process of building out a new data center. One of the items I needed to know was a rough estimate of our new, monthly electrical bill. In some cases, you may need to show a return on investment (ROI) for going to a virtualized environment using VMWare or Microsoft Hyper-V. You can calculate the number of watts your devices use by visiting http://www.dell.com/calc.

Did you know that your current Android or iPhone apps can be ported to Windows Phone 7? Now, there’s no “easy” button that will auto-magically convert the apps for you. However, in a post on June 9th, 2011, the Windows Phone team explained how Android apps can be converted. Microsoft has provided an easy package for Android developers. The package includes:

One of my team members was working on an issue today within an application. The application is setup to use web.config transformations. Web.config transforms are a great way to create multiple build configurations (including, but not limited to, the debug and release build configuration that are built-in) and allow different configuration settings based on the build. For instance, you may have a database connection set to your localhost when you are debugging locally. However, you can use web.config transforms to change the server name when you publish the application using the release build configuration. This can also be used to ensure that every time you publish an application as a release, debug and trace are disabled for your application.

If you’ve built a Windows Phone 7 application, you may have noticed that if you pin your application to the Start menu, the name of your application appears in the lower, left-hand side of the tile. You can change the text in this tile, by right-clicking on the application and going to properties. On the Application menu, modify the Tile title properties. A sample of this area is displayed below:

Earlier today at the E3 Expo, Microsoft unveiled several new features to Xbox Live, Kinect, and announced several new games including Halo 4, Kinect Sports Season Two, and Kinect Disneyland Adventures. Kinect Disneyland Adventures is pegged to be the first Kinect game including Disney characters. I stumbled across a screenshot that appears the game will be released on November 15th this year.

I’m leaving this blog up for now. However, all new blog content is being moved to JasonGaylord.com. I’m posting lots of things regarding MVC, Orchard, WP7 and other new Microsoft technologies. Be sure to check it out today at http://JasonGaylord.com.

If you’ve checked out my new website recently, you may have noticed that I have included the weather on the site. Mouse over on the right-hand side and you’ll notice a “bing-like” box that will appear. I’ll talk about this a bit more in a bit, but you’ll notice that the weather pulls for my local zip code. These are the results from the Weather Channel’s weather.com.

Late last week when I was at CodeStock 2011, I ran into an error with the orchard.exe command line utility. The exception generated looked similar to the following:

I’m just wrapping up a trip to Eastern Tennessee’s CodeStock 2011 (in Knoxville to be precise). While I was down here, I presented on the Orchard CMS. Both the conference and talk were great and while I’m never really satisfied with any of my talks, I have recorded it. It will soon be available on the CodeStock website for all to view at a later date and time. However, I know that Michael Neel is quite busy and it may take him another day (or week) to get everything up there. So, I’ve jumped the gun and published it up myself. Be sure to check it out:

I arrived in Sevierville, TN last evening in preparation for CodeStock 2011. I’ll be presenting about the Orchard CMS tomorrow at 12:30pm in room 401. You can read more about the talk on the CodeStock site at http://codestock.org/Sessions/grow-your-website-using-orchard.aspx. I’ll be posting pictures later on after visiting various stops.