Hello, I'm   Jason

Many developers, including myself, have installed the initial beta of Google Chrome. However, downloaders beware. There is a new vulnerability (or old depending on how you look at it) with Google Chrome. For more information, check out the full ZDNet article at http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1843&tag=nl.e539.

I listened to the announcement of Google Chrome this afternoon and also flipped through the comic book that Google released yesterday. My initial reaction was that Chrome is going to be just another browser that I’d need to support.

Google Chrome has been announced and will be released at 3pm EST on September 2nd. More details to follow. All times below will be in EST.

I was just checking out the improvements the team has made in beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. While I haven’t had time to mess with all of the improvements, I see lots of opportunities to create enhancements for my sites to allow visitors to get what they are looking for faster. Be sure to check out the full list of improvements at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/28/part-i-better-everyday-browsing.aspx. You can download IE8 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Chris Love, posted a tweet today about Adobe Kuler. Kuler is a web/flash based application that allows developers and designers to upload and download color swatches for Adobe Photoshop. It’s a great way, as Chris put it, for developers to pick up color schemes/themes.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Velocity and how this distributed caching system can improve your web applications? Then you’d better check out the new Velocity podcast at ASP.NET Podcast. You can download the MP3 at http://www.aspnetpodcast.com/PodcastFiles/ASPNETPodcast20080820-Velocity.mp3.

On one of the email lists that I’m on, someone had posted a question about running a website using the root path “/” or a different virtual path than the project name that is populated by default. James Crowley pointed out a blog entry from Scott Guthrie where Scott walks through this process in 4 easy steps. To check it out, visit http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/19/tip-trick-how-to-run-a-root-site-with-the-local-web-server-using-vs-2005-sp1.aspx.

Sounds like Windows 7 might be previewed at the PDC. If not, significant details will surely be shared. No, I didn’t escape one of the Microsoft buildings with their business plan but rather came across the team’s new blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/. The first posts were yesterday (August 14th) and I’m sure more posts will be coming soon. Be sure to check it out!

Scott Galloway from the Microsoft DevDiv team has posted a couple of known issues with Service Pack 1 in ASP.NET 3.5 on the ASP.NET forums at http://forums.asp.net/t/1305800.aspx. The issues he currently has on the post are:

I was looking for a quick and easy solution to export data from SQL into an Excel format from within my ASP.NET application. I came across a great video posted by Beth Massi on the asp.net website (Video #7 at the bottom at http://www.asp.net/learn/linq-videos/). Beth steps through creating the LINQ to XML and how you can populate your Excel document. When I used this in an ASP.NET application, I added the XML declaration to the Response.Write so that Excel could understand the document. In ASP.NET, the XMLDocument type has a tendency to drop the XML declaration when writing out the document using .ToString.