Hello, I'm   Jason

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.

Scott Guthrie announced yesterday that Silverlight 2 has been released. Rather than reposting everything he stated, you can read his original post here. Here are a few links to note:

I gave a talk this past weekend at the Philly.NET Code Camp 2008.3. I’ve uploaded my slide deck, project, and a few additional files (used in the demo) in case anyone would like to review again. I was also able to find another way to fake HttpContext. Check out Stephen Walther’s blog post about faking the controller context. He also has a blog post about unit testing the views without a web server.

Wally is at it again (finally). He just released his latest podcast after being away since mid-August. Anyway, his podcast is about a new feature in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 (formerly the ASP.NET 3.5 extensions) called Routing. Routing can be done using System.Routing, ASP.NET MVC, or 3rd party plug-ins such as NVelocity. Check out this podcast to find out more:

Awhile back, one of my friends over at Telligent, Scott Watermasysk, posted a message regarding FeedBurner and hosting your own RSS feeds. FeedBurner is a web application owned by Google that hosts syndicated feeds and provides statistics based on those feeds such as the number of viewers. Scott recommended setting the MyBrand feature of FeedBurner to point to your own site and creating a CName entry with your domain’s DNS. You can read more about that here: http://simpable.com/technology/feedburner-cname/.