Hello, I'm   Jason

We’re coming down the home stretch to TECHbash 2008. 90% of the prep work is complete. Wow do we have some swag to giveaway. Each attendee will receive a SWAGbag with an event t-shirt, pen, and notepad. In addition, we’ll be raffling off 41 books, 5 copies of Infragistics Net Advantage, 3 Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pros, 4 Office Ultimate 2007 NFRs, 4 Vista Ultimate NFRs, 5 Heroes Happen Here disks with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Beta (with voucher for full product upon release), and Windows Server 2008, 2 Vista Ultimate SP1 with OneCare, 3 Technet Subscriptions, Visual Studio 2008 Standard, TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio, TechSmith’s SnagIt, and a bunch of other software including XP Pro, SQL 2k, SharePoint 2k3, Project Server 2k3, and Exchange 2k3. The Unified Connections presenters will also be raffling off a Dialogic Media Center (DMG1008LSW) valued at $1200. Now that’s a lot of swag. If you haven’t signed up yet, be sure you do today at http://techbash.com/registration.

Xobni went public recently offering it’s beta tool for download at http://xobni.com. Xobni, inbox spelled backwards, is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook. I’ve been using it with Outlook 2007 for quite some time and appreciate it’s usability. I like being able to click on an email to review all emails to and from that particular user and to also see their contact info. I’d like the ability to edit their contact info if it was incorrect, but I’m sure that will be added in the future. If you haven’t used it yet, be sure to check it out.

Have you visited dell.com yet today? Dell is 24 years old. Sometimes when you deal with a company for so long, you forget about some of the good (and bad) things that they have done in the past. It’s nice to use these lists when you reconsider that company or look for another one. Dell has provided a “24 reasons to use us” list at http://tinyurl.com/5uawpa. They’ve also provided a link to the top PC shippers in the world and the US. Those statistics can be found at http://tinyurl.com/4bx683.

This isn’t funny, but it is. It should be a daily WTF. Wally just sent me this forum post where someone deleted a little more than anticipated. It sounds like this guy can be in quite a lot of trouble… http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1263379&SiteID=1. I’d recommend setting up backups on your SQL server next time.

Sonu Kapoor over at DotNetSlackers.com has, not only a great site, but also some great AJAX controls. He’s always looking to improve his controls and today he stumbled across something. He was working on a prototype where he had a div nested inside of an AJAX tabControl. The div had the property onscroll set. When the div was inside the tabControl, the onscroll function didn’t work. However, outside of the tabControl, it did. Turns out he missed adding the CssStyle to set the proper height/width of the div for the overflow css property and onscroll javascript function to work properly. It’s a really simple thing to overlook.

This afternoon, Microsoft announced that it was releasing Expression Studio 2 and the containing products. The suite includes Web 2, Blend 2, Design 2, Media 2, and Encoder 2. Expression is Microsoft’s competition for the Adobe Creative Suite. The biggest highlights in the new version include Expression Web’s ability to design PHP pages and increased support and tools for designing WPF and Silverlight applications.

The TECHbash 2008 session schedule has been released. Registration begins at 7:30am. During the registration period, a continental breakfast will be served in the dining room. The keynote presentation by Joe Stagner will begin at 8:30am with breakout sessions to follow. Lunch will take place at noon in the dining room and we may have some activities going on during that time. The final breakout sessions will take place after lunch with a presenter Q&A following that. To wrap up the event, we will be holding a raffle. Some raffle prizes will require that you are present to win. More details about the raffle prizes, our “Pick-A-Prize Auction”, and our SWAGbags will be announced next week.

I had a table that contained a couple of columns defined in SQL 2005 as tinyint. In SQL, I’d generally write something like:

I found a great post which summarizes aggregate functions in LINQ. It includes examples for Average, Sum, and Count. Check it out at http://www.dev102.com/2008/04/16/how-to-use-aggregate-functions-with-linq-to-sql/. As always, you can test your functions by using LINQPad which is available at http://www.linqpad.net/.

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