This past Saturday, Doug Reilly, a great friend and colleague of mine, passed away. My prayers go out to his family and friends in this time of grief especially being so close to the holiday season. He will be missed by all who knew him. His full obituary can be found at http://www.app.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006612240457.

A new Halo 3 trailer was shown once during last night’s Monday Night Football game. You can see it on the XBox site here.

Many of you know Doug Reilly from reading blog posts, forum posts, and articles. Doug has fallen extremely ill. Please help to support his causes by donating to the Live Strong foundation in honor of Doug:

I recently setup an account with BlogMailr.com. It’s difficult to get the time right now to blog on the site, so why not use email? Thanks to the folks over at Telligent for providing this cool service. Very nice!

Great! Windows Vista is now off for production. You can read more about the release notice here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/nov06/11-08VistaRTM.mspx

Yesterday, the ASP.NET team released beta 2 of the Microsoft AJAX Library. You can download it at http://ajax.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47.

It’s definitely interesting to talk about how technology is changing and effecting the world. Microsoft has taken this a step further. They have created a home to demonstrate technology in the year 2015. Check out some details here: http://tech.msn.com/products/article.aspx?cp-documentid=994057

If you plan on using Microsoft AJAX with web services, you better plan hard. The AJAX Control Toolkit is currently built using web services. I attempted to use the NumericUpDown control provided in a user control. However, I continually received an error message stating that The given key was not present in the dictionary. Upon further investigation, I found that the partial pages in the code samples inherited the CommonPage class. The CommonPage class, found in the App_Code folder, inherited the Page class. The page class contains some additional events in the load cycle that the user controls do not contain such as Pre_Init. In the CommonPage class, there is an override for PreInit which grabs all content placeholders and adds them to a list. That was it, once I switched the contents from a user control into a page, it worked. Of course there are other work around solutions to get the User Control to pull the content place holders.

The Small Business Site Starter Kit has been released on the ASP.NET website. Find out more details by visiting http://www.asp.net/downloads/starterkits/SmallBusiness.aspx?tabid=62 today.

Over the weekend, Microsoft released the first beta of the Microsoft AJAX Library. Be sure to download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=90E0CCDF-D246-4929-A027-D5EE6F806851&displaylang=en.