Hello, I'm   Jason

.NET Valley released their new website yesterday. They also announced that they will be at the Vista/Office 2007 demo tomorrow morning at Circuit City. To find out more, visit http://dotnetvalley.com/news/articles/article5.aspx.

Jim Allchin, former Co-President of the Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft, has retired on the same day Microsoft releases Vista and Office 2007 to consumers. For more on the official launch, visit http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/vistaofficelaunch/default.msp

I’ll be at the Circuit City in Wilkes-Barre PA tomorrow with a crew from .NET Valley. We’ll be there to help Circuit City launch Vista and Office 2007. Be sure to stop by to see the demo and pick up some swag. For the .NET Valley announcement, please visit http://dotnetvalley.com/news/articles/article5.aspx.

.NET Valley Releases New Website

First off, I’d like to thank Steve Smith for helping me out yesterday with a major brain <insert your favorite phrase here>. Like always, my issue turned out to be something stupid. Anyway, my issue ended up bringing something else to my attention. Why not use regular expressions to grab data from strings being passed in and then do something with that data. Hmmm.

I was reading Wally’s post about how ECIS slams Microsoft over Vista. I completely agree with Wally. Industry leaders seem to take an extreme amount of criticism whenever they release new items or take the “wrong” steps in getting things done. Microsoft, Walmart, GM and Ford, and even sports franchises such as the New York Yankees all experience this. I find this interesting. All of these organizations have become leaders in their industry because they have fans. Then organizations such as ECIS try to make an extra buck by attacking successful organizations. Like Wally, I don’t know much about ECIS, but I find it the idea that another organization can dictate what Microsoft does a little skewed. I hate using cliches, but “can’t we all just get along.”

The January 2007 CTP of the Enterprise Library 3.0 has been released. For more information, please visit http://www.codeplex.com/entlib.

Its pretty easy to forget some of the cool SQL functions that are built into SQL server. I’ve been driving myself crazy adding in a custom function that would take a varchar variable and convert it to an empty string if it was null. I totally forget about the lovely IsNull function. What functions have you forgotten about before either because you haven’t used it in awhile or were caught up in doing something and you couldn’t remember or think clearly?

Check out the new ASP.NET Podcast available at aspnetpodcast.com.

Wow! I’ve been trying to search everywhere to figure out a way to deploy Crystal Reports with VS 2005. I knew I could use Click Once to do it and I had a feeling there was a merge module somewhere. However, the Crystal module for VS 2005 is not in the default folder. Of course not. That would be… easy. Instead, I went through about 10-15 click throughs on the Business Objects website before I finally found it in the obvious location. All of the merge modules for any language and version (.NET, Java, VS 2003, VS 2005, etc) can be found at http://support.businessobjects.com/downloads/merge_modules.asp#07. The link provided herein will take you right to the VS 2005 downloads. Special thanks to Julie Lerman for pointing out the website that led me to this.