Hello, I'm   Jason

Upcoming Meeting: August 23rd The next .NET Valley meeting will be held on Wednesday August 23rd at Luzerne County Community College , Nanticoke PA. A map of the campus can be found here . We will meet in building 7, room 703 . The event will begin at …

If you haven’t heard yet, Dell will be recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries, the largest number in the company’s history. You can find out if your battery is affected by visiting http://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/. For more on this story, see MSNBC’s article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14350403/?GT1=8404.

I needed a way to programmatically create a vscontent and vstemplate file for a few large web projects. So, I created a VB 2005 app that does just that. Earlier today I decided that I’d clean it up a bit, throw in a sponsorship plug, and create a click…

Yesterday I switched advertising systems from Google AdSense to Lake Quincy Media. What a difference! The quality of advertisements is 10 times greater than what I had before. Google’s AdSense system was intelligent, but failed miserably on my site. 90% of the ads were related to blog or photo sites because blog and photo are in my menu. I now have advertisements specific to my site’s purpose. Thanks to Steve Smith and the rest of the crew at Lake Quincy Media for getting my setup.

Well, Abdul just called me from Domain Registry Services. Seriously, these people should really give up this scam already. It’s doing nothing but wasting time for other individuals. I’m on the do-not-call list for everyone of my phone numbers…

Wow! Microsoft is releasing an express version of the XNA Game Studio. For those of you not familiar with XNA, it’s the gaming studio that Microsoft Studios uses to build games for Windows and the XBox. Previously, developers would have to pay a fee …

Back in July, Sam Judson released a pretty good article on the Coding4Fun web site. Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/webcoder/flickr/default.aspx.

Well, I figured it was time for a bit of a change so I switched Community Server themes on my weblogs.asp.net blog. I’ve been quite busy lately dealing with various projects at my house and at work. We finally have 95% of our landscaping done. The only portion not completed is our pond in our back yard (and the grass that can’t grow because our weather is either 100 degrees F with 100% humidity or downpours of 2 inches an hour). We put in landscape lighting, spread more dirt and mulch, and put the pond in. I’ll get some updated pics up soon on the yard. At work, we received a new Dell 42 unit rack, new Dell IP, 16 port KVM switch and flat panel monitor tray, new web server, 5 new PCs, 1 new laptop, a broken 1910 AC unit in our server room (seriously?), and will soon have a new server room floor. That’s all besides the new product we are pushing out, a few articles I’m writing, and our user group. Phew! So where has the time gone lately? :-)

We have been working with SBA 2006 since its beta last year. Our company has 7 licenses where our 5 accountants connect a central SQL Server 2000 database that is shared. Knowing this isn’t the way SBA 2006 is supposed to work, we have been able to successfully accomplish this task. That’s where Microsoft made their first mistake. SBA’s big appeal to us was the fact that data wasn’t stored in a proprietary format. However, not being able to install it on a database server made it frustrating.

Since ASP.NET 1.0, one of the most popular books (if not the most popular book) has been Stephen Walther’s ASP.NET Unleashed. Recently, Sams Publishing has released ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed, again written by Stephen. This review will discuss the good and the bad of the book.