Hello, I'm   Jason

I’ve been reading up on recent blog posts by Mitch Denny lately regarding a laptop he had received from Microsoft. Earlier today, I received my daily email from eWeek containing an opinion post regarding the *free* laptops. I followed through all of the links provided and read up on the stories behind the laptops. It seems as though they are tied to a game called the Vanishing Point. Many developers and IT pros have commented about Microsoft’s latest gimmick.

Have you ever received the error message “Can not add the user because a user with that name already exists” when trying to add a user in SharePoint 2003? Well, there’s a fix. Most people overlook the SharePoint users collection because it is nested in a different web than the admin web. So, to see a list of users, visit http://ServerName/_layouts/1033/Siteusrs.aspx where the ServerName is the name of your web. For more information, visit the Microsoft KB and look up 893696.

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.