Hello, I'm   Jason

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/.

I’ve updated my RSS feed on this blog to use my FeedBurner account. Be sure to change the RSS feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/JasonNGaylord. Sorry for any inconvenience!

I needed Copy Source As HTML support in Visual Studio 2008. Luckily I came across this post today with a walk-through to set it up in VS 2008. I can’t wait for Microsoft to get this into Visual Studio. Too bad there wasn’t a Windows Live Writer add-on for it.

We still have some open registration for TECHbash 2008. Be sure to visit http://techbash.com/registration to register for the event. We’ve confirmed some great speakers from some great companies including, but not limited to, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and Nortel. Joe Stagner will be presenting the keynote presentation.

Since its inception in 2005, TECHbash has evolved into the premier technology conference in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Join an estimated 300 Developers, IT Professionals, CIO’s and Industry Experts from Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and host-state, Pennsylvania. This one day event brings together a broad spectrum of Technology Professionals to network, knowledge share and discuss existing technology solutions to business challenges, as well as preview prerelease products on the bleeding edge.

This year, we expanded to three tracks offering more presentations and providing you with more content choices representing a greater breadth of Industry insight. We will open the event with a keynote presentation from the unstoppable juggernaut, Joe Stagner, Program Manager for Microsoft’s Web Tools and Platform Division.Attendees will have the opportunity to:

Wow. After 2 hours of pain and suffering, I ran into my own daily WTF. I had some script contained within a .js file in my web. Like many times before, I created a reference to the script in the header. However, the script would only work in the Internet Explorer family and not in Firefox. After some aggravation (and my Starbuck’s Pike Place Roast kicking in) I realized that the MIME type was set to text/jscript instead of text/javascript. I wish we can modify IntelliSense locally to get items added/removed as needed.

I came across this post and found it to be an interesting implementation of Mario. The game is written in 14kb of JavaScript. Check it out at http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2008/04/super-mario-in-14kb-javascript.html.