Hello, I'm   Jason

The Small Business Site Starter Kit has been released on the ASP.NET website. Find out more details by visiting http://www.asp.net/downloads/starterkits/SmallBusiness.aspx?tabid=62 today.

Over the weekend, Microsoft released the first beta of the Microsoft AJAX Library. Be sure to download it at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=90E0CCDF-D246-4929-A027-D5EE6F806851&displaylang=en.

Yesterday we installed a Linksys SPA-9000 Small Business phone system in one of our newly acquired remote offices. The office will only have up to 3 people in it at any time, so we stayed with the 4 phone system instead of the 16. We chose ZingoTel for our service provider. Initially, I was a bit skeptical because its difficult to get to a person to talk to there and finally, when you do, their phone is breaking up. However, they walked us through the installation yesterday step-by-step. Our phones came online in less than 30 minutes. We made a few phone calls and the clarity was perfect. Today we noticed that we’ve had an issue with our phone lines, but I’m not sure why that has occurred. We’re looking into it now which is why this is review 1.

According to a press release by Microsoft, they are on track to release Vista in November to all Volume License companies.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 yesterday. I was in Columbia, Maryland and didn’t get a chance to check it out. I’ll be downloading it today to see how the final version works.

I guess Microsoft is running into some issues with the XBox.com/Live migration. It’s still offline.

Many new enterprise-level copiers are equipped with color printing, copying, and scanning capabilities. Recently, we’ve replaced one of ours with a new Canon ImageRunner. In our setup, only one or two departments are allowed to print or copy in color, but we want everyone to be able to scan in color. So, we have created departmental codes for “logging in” to the copier and created mailboxes for print capabilities. One of the issues we ran into is with one of our custom apps. The app is quite old and desperately needs updating. When the app prints, it publishes data from SQL to an Access database. From there, the Access database prints a Snapshot report to a PDF file using Adobe Acrobat. The default print setting for the Adobe PDF writer is Color. We had to switch it to Black and White so the users would not receive an error message stating that their copy amounts have been exceeded. Very interesting stuff.

I’ve been so busy lately that catching up on some of the new things out there has been tough. The other day I found myself teaching someone about different parts of ASP.NET, LINQ, BLINQ, and the Microsoft AJAX Library (Codenamed “ATLAS”)….

I’ve been extremely busy lately working on a corporate acquisition and modifying a Microsoft SBA add-in that I’ve created. Really interesting stuff since we have such a unique business. Anyway, Wally noticed my Powered By IIS 6 logo on my website…

Quite often in the user group world, members question what the difference is between .NET 2.0 and 3.0 or what LINQ and BLINQ are. Julie Lerman, a fellow user group leader and great .NET guru, ran into these similar issues. Yesterday she made a great post…