Hello, I'm   Jason

Join the MSDN Team (Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, and David Solivan) and the rest of .NET Valley for the “Best Wings” in the area. On November 13th, we’ll be meeting at the new Quaker Steak & Lube found in Dickson City. The evening will begin at 6pm. .NET Valley will be sponsoring some Wings and beverages.

Wally just published the latest ASP.NET Podcast. He also announced that there is a new co-host… David Penton. For those of you that don’t know Dave, he’s an extremely talented guy and should help to keep Wally in line. Keep up the good work guys!

DevExpress and Microsoft announced a partnership today to offer CodeRush Xpress for free. At the present time it’s only available for non-express versions of Visual Studio and will only work with C# (per their post). I’m sure the other support will be just around the corner. If you’re interested be sure to download Xpress here.

The Microsoft .NET Framework received a new logo and a revised site recently. The new logo can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/sayanghosh/archive/2008/10/26/new-net-logo.aspx. The new site can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/net/. Nice logo! It’s very slick and fits within the other modern day Microsoft logos.

I am expecting a package from the USPS and have been since Thursday. The package was too large for my mailbox, so I received a re-delivery notice. On Thursday night, I signed it and placed it in my mailbox. It was picked up on Friday and the package wasn’t on the truck for redelivery. Thinking that maybe they didn’t bring the package out for redelivery on Friday just because, I waited for Saturday. Sure it was pouring rain all day, but I never received my package on Saturday either. Today I called the post office. They told me that they didn’t have the package there and it was likely at the regional post office for delivery. I called there and they took down my tracking number but said it was impossible for them to track the package on their computer system. I can’t believe the USPS doesn’t have a software package to allow better tracking. They have to rely on the people that work there. I was told that the gentleman that worked the weekend shift wouldn’t be in until late morning and when he came in, they’d ask him if he knew where it was. They finally took my phone number and said they’d call back.

So I’m not going to be at the Microsoft PDC this year primarily because of all the work I have to catch up on. However, I can participate virtually at NotAtPDC.com. If you’re going to be at the PDC, be sure to blog about it and tweet your URL to @NotAtPDC. Also, there will be other virtual presentations and such that will be done throughout the week. I’m likely going to do a talk tomorrow sometime. We’re still ironing out the details.

How cool is this? One of my good friends, Aaron Seet, just posted a message to one of the email lists that I’m on with the following link:

Microsoft and .NET Valley would like to invite you to come to the MSDN Freedom Roadshow in Scranton, Pennsylvania on November 14th, 2008. The event will be held at Scranton University in Room 405 of the DeNaples Student Center and will begin at 9am. A schedule of events can be found below.

Stephen Walther has posted a great list of Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks. I found 3 or 4 that I didn’t realize when checking out his post. The two I’ll likely use the most are number 1 and 3. Great stuff Stephen!

Last evening, Scott Guthrie announced that ASP.NET MVC beta has been pushed out. There’s a ton of really cool, new features that have been added. Be sure to check out Scott’s book, err I mean post to read up on what new has been added. As Scott has mentioned in his post, click here to download it.  You can also visit asp.net/mvc to explore tutorials, quick starts, and videos to learn more.