Hello, I'm   Jason

Unless you are using IE 32-bit, don’t expect the Clearspring widgets to work. Clearspring is one of the leaders in building widgets for social networks and Vista. The reason their widgets do not work is because Flash is not yet supported on 64-bit platforms. By default, the Vista Sidebar on a 64-bit system displays widgets by using IE 64-bit.

For quite some time I’ve been working with a modified version of Scott Hanselman’s “Dark Theme” for Visual Studio. The reason for my modifications is that the HTML and CSS settings were very difficult to read. Here is the complete list of changes I’ve made in Tools > Options > Environment > Fonts and Colors:

SQL Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing (RTM’d) today. For more information about this release, be sure to visit Microsoft’s press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/aug08/08-06SQLServer2008PR.mspx.

Rob Chartier blogged about the ASPInsiders late last week. If you are unfamiliar about the group, it’s purpose, and it’s members, be sure to visit http://weblogs.asp.net/rchartier/archive/2008/08/01/who-are-the-aspinsiders.aspx.

Amazon released a new portable device called Kindle to their marketplace today. Kindle has the ability to read thousands of books that are available in the Amazon marketplace. Users have the ability to preview books before they decide to purchase them. In addition, the Kindle product has the ability for users to store Microsoft Word documents on it for later viewing.

All day I was stumped on why there wasn’t a simple way to grab the first object in a sequence other than using:

CodeStock is coming August 9th to Knoxville, Tennessee and you should see the speaker line-up! Jeff Prosise will present the opening keynote and Alan Stevens will mediate the open spaces. There’s a ton of great presenters that will be at CodeStock including Steve Andrews, Rachel Appel, James Avery, Jason Follas, Amanda Laucher, Chris Love, Wally McClure, Jeff McWherter, and more! Be sure to check out the agenda at http://codestock.org/Pages/Agenda.aspx and register for the event today!

Sonu Kapoor just posted about getting started with the AjaxDataControls in Visual Studio 2005. The AjaxDataControls can be found on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxDataControls/. Included in the controls are a JavaScript version of the Repeater, DataList, and DataGrid. If you’d like to have AJAX functionality over your data with minimal coding, I’d definitely check this out.

FireFox. Internet Explorer 8. Both have great JavaScript debugging tools. Thanks to those tools, I only spent 5 minutes on an issue that could have taken hours to figure out. It was one of those moments when you know its something simple but you can’t figure out what it is. I had a page that loaded web service data into an AjaxDataControl Repeater. After the web service call, I entered some JavaScript to grab a page parameter and choose the item on the page that was selected. When I ran the page, I received an error that the object was undefined. However, if I added an alert to check the parameter, the page loaded fine. After using one of the debug tools I saw that the data wasn’t populated yet. That’s because ASP.NET AJAX makes web service and WCF calls asynchronously. To resolve this issue, I moved the code from the page load method to the method assigned to the successful data binding.

The next .NET Valley User Group event will be on June 18th at Scranton University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There will be two talks that evening. The first will begin at 6pm and will be presented by Michael Murphy. Michael will talk about the ins and outs of Microsoft Small Business Server 2008. The second talk will begin at 7:15pm or so and will be presented by yours truly. I will be talking about LINQ to SQL. To register for the event, please visit [http://dotnetvalley.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?eventid=59]http://dotnetvalley.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?eventid=59 “http://dotnetvalley.com/events/eventdetails.aspx?eventid=59”).