Hello, I'm   Jason

I just read a post stating that the Visual Studio 2008 VPCs are expiring on November 1st, 2007. It is recommended that you backup any data that you don’t want to lose as soon as possible. More information can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/10/25/vs2008-beta2-vpcs-expiring-prematurely.aspx.

I just read an article how AT&T refused to give a fire victim in Southern California any slack regarding one of their receivers. You can read the full article at http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Wants-300-From-Wildfire-Victim-88826. How cruel! I cannot believe they wouldn’t provide any lenience with their bill. Before I start receiving tons of comments supporting AT&T’s position, let’s evaluate their position. Let’s examine the facts. According to CNN, at least 1,635 homes have been destroyed. Let’s assume that every one of these homes have a $300 receiver. That means that AT&T is out $490,500. According to AT&T’s 3rd Quarter report, their free cash flow after dividends totaled $2.4 billion and total revenue equaled $30.1 billion. So, the $490k is less than 1% of their free cash flow and total revenues. The other arguement that could be made is that AT&T is worried that others who were not affected by the fires could be using this to their advantage. My arguement to AT&T would be to work with the major insurance companies and request a claim number from their customers. Hopefully DSLReports.com receives a positive response from AT&T.

I’m not impressed with the IMAP capabilities with Google Gmail. So far I’ve noticed that my IMAP connection has dropped numerous times. I’ve highlighted 60 spam messages in [Gmail]\Spam and hit delete while noticing timeouts. I’ve tried purging deleted items and noticed that the items delete only 5 at a time. And, I’ve used more than just Outlook 2007 to connect.

I’ve been getting emails from numerous people about a Pennsylvania Cell Phone ban. There’s been two different letters going around. One looks like a legitimate house bill and the other looks like a legislative briefing (http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/n_pa_cell_phone_ban.htm). If you do a quick Google or Live.com search, you’ll quickly find that this is a hoax (such as http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_pa_cell_phone_ban.htm). In fact, there is no legislation currently in the PA State Legislation system that pertains to a cell phone ban.

Microsoft announced that they now offer a Free 411 number for callers to find a business. It is powered by Live Search. The phone number is 1-800-225-5411.

I was struggling with an issue today when converting some C# to VB.NET. C# has a really cool yield return statement that is used in an iterator block to provide a value to the enumerator object. VB.NET does not have the yield keyword. So, there are a few solutions (none of which are really clean) to get around this. You could use a return statement to return the value if you are looping through and would like to break an enumerator and return a single value. However, if you’d like to return the entire enumeration, create a List() of the child type and return the list. Since you are usually using this with an IEnumerable, the List() will work nice.

Quite often, vendors pass images or PDFs to customers using the binary contents of the file. To make it more secure, they convert the binary contents to a Base64 string. A full explanation about Base64 encoding can be found at Wikipedia here. Anyway, when you receive the string, you cannot simply write it to a file or to the browser. First, you must convert the data into a Byte array. The sample code below demonstrates this:

On Wednesday, Scott Guthrie announced that beginning with version 3.5 of the .NET Framework (and VS2008), the base class libraries will be browsable and can be used for debugging purposes.

I discovered an issue in VS 2008 Beta 2 that will most likely be an issue when the product goes to RTM. I notified Microsoft of the issue and they have pushed this back to VS 2008 SP1 because its so late in the development process. The issue is with adding a web service to a website. When adding a web service to a pre-existing website, a template for a web service is created. It will take VS 2008 to realize that the file has inline code. Then, when adding a snippet (right-click in the code window and choose Insert Snippet) that contains imports for a namespace, the namespaces are added at the top of the page like:

I was going to be a presenter at Remix Boston, but had to back down due to a previous conflict. However, it is definitely promising to be a great event! Be sure to check out the details at http://www.remix07boston.com/.