Hello, I'm   Jason

I just received word that I’ve been awarded with the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET for 2009. I’ve been a Microsoft MVP since 2003. It’s always nice to receive the MVP award, but it’s even better to see the impact that you have on the community. Six years ago, Northeastern Pennsylvania had no user group. In fact, most developers and IT professionals had no idea that Microsoft had a new .NET Framework. Things have changed. Many companies now use the framework and our user group has expanded to include IT professional and open source content. We’ve hosted events at our area’s best colleges and universities including Scranton University, Penn State – Lehman, and Luzerne County Community College. We’ve held an annual event called TechBash that has had as many as 125 at the event. I need to thank the community for this award. I hope we continue to grow technology in the area.

I came across a post on StackOverflow.com regarding web site performance. Quite often you can take a look at your application and find 10 different ways to make it more efficient. Depending on your environment, you may have many different ways to increase performance. For instance, in a shared hosting environment, you’ll likely be limited as to what you can do on the server, but can tweak your application appropriately.

One of the prerequisites for TFS 2008 is that it must be installed to work with SQL Server 2005 SP2 or SQL Server 2008. However, TFS 2008, by itself, will not work with SQL Server 2008. You’ll receive an error message that your SQL Server instance is not compatible as I’ve mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/4shjod. You’ll receive other error messages such as Full Text not being installed. After struggling for a couple of days, I decided to ask one of my local TFS guru’s, Steve Andrews. He pointed me to an article that led me to Abdelhamid’s blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/aabdou/archive/2008/05/13/team-foundation-server-sp1-beta-now-available.aspx. Following this, I was able to get it installed.

I’ll be presenting at the third code camp of 2008 for the Philly.NET code camp. Apparently, several other Microsoft MVPs and ASPInsiders will as well. It should be a great time. Be sure to register on phillydotnet.org.

The full letter from Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora, is available at http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=627. Basically, Tom has stated that a version for Windows Mobile devices will be coming out, but he refuses to guarantee when. One would assume it would be sooner rather than later and would hopefully support WMV 5, 6, and 6.1.

The IE team posted a blog entry yesterday at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/08/microsoft-css-vendor-extensions.aspx. Apparently they are now going to support certain CSS properties and attributes to comply with CSS 2.1 by tagging them with -ms-. For a full list, be sure to visit the blog link above.

After many technology professionals and marketing organizations questioned the first in a series of advertisements involving Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld, and Microsoft, an explanation was delivered. Earlier today, Microsoft published a response to several questions regarding the first advertisement; first by sending an internal message to employees of Microsoft, then by posting a public explanation at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/windows/featureStories.aspx?story=660dee9e-9606-4e77-843e-ed81d83c0bfe.

I usually don’t like mentioning anything political in my blog. However, this I found interesting. BetaNews has written several entries regarding the democratic and republic president and vice-president candidates. Here they are in order of publish date:

In IIS7, there are two modes for ASP.NET application pools: classic mode (only mode available for IIS6) and integrated mode. Integrated Mode offers quite a bit with IIS7 and is the recommended mode for application pools (more details at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/244/how-to-take-advantage-of-the-iis7-integrated-pipeline/). One of the changes is that the Integrated mode does not have access to the HttpContext during the Application\_Start method in the global.asax. It also has an affect on HttpModules and HttpHandlers that reference the HttpContext as well. You’ll want to keep this in mind when building your application structure.

Mary Jo Foley posted a summary of the first Microsoft advertisement that played during tonight’s NFL game. Her full blog posting can be found at http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1569#comments. For those of you that want to see the video, here it is: