Hello, I'm   Jason

According to Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch, Microsoft may ponder removing the Save to PDF option in the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Personally, I hope they don’t remove it. Adobe should understand that there should be other benefits to having Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional besides saving documents as PDF. Right now, for the common IT professional or office user, there are very few. Eventually, people will stop purchasing Acrobat just for that reason whether Microsoft includes the Save to PDF option or not.

Within the past 3 years, Google has taken aim at Microsoft and visa versa. Nearly all services and/or planned services have been countered by the other. Here is a current (as of this post) list comparing Microsoft and Google products:

Sometimes on a web page you have a div container with 2 or more divs within. In many cases, you’ll want the background from one of the divs to fill the container div. Unfortunately, the div style property height does not support a percentage value as of XHTML 1.1. Instead, you can “fool” the div by repeating the background on the container control like this:

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<div id="container" style="background-image: url('containerbkg.gif'); background-repeat: repeat-y;">  
    <div id="menu" style="float: left; width: 100px;">  
        Item 1<br/>  
        Item 2  
    </div>  
    <div id="body" style="margin-left: 100px; width: 300pt;">  
        Body goes here<br/><br/>  
        Body continues here<br/><br/>  
        Body ends here.  
    </div>  
</div>

Before I begin, I’d like to apologize to all the good service and support personnel that do work at Verizon. I’ve never met you, but I’m sure you’re out there. I went online last night to do some work and noticed that the DSL was down. I checked my router and the line status said DOWN. Good enough, I figured I’d call Verizon to see what was going on. I live in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. A message stated that service was down from somewhere in Massachusetts to New York City (about 2 1/2 hours away) to Virginia. I wasn’t sure if I was included in the area, so I finally received a service rep. The rep forced me to do everything from unhooking my router to resetting the modem to attempting to connect via the modem. Nothing worked. The last thing we tried was changing the connection settings in the modem from bridge to PPPoE. After 10 seconds I received a message box that said “A timeout occurred while attempting to connect. The connection is down.” The service rep then said that because I received a timeout, my modem must be bad. I kid you not. The connection is down so that automatically means the modem is bad. I asked her if by chance the line is down and she said I’m not in a reported outage area and she could not test to see if the connection is down, but she’d bet that it was a modem issue instead of a line issue. <sigh>

Wally McClure and Paul Glavich, both ASPInsiders, run the unofficial ASP.NET Podcast. Each week a new “episode” is released where someone from the ASP.NET Podcast team usually interviews a few peers about upcoming technology, tips and tricks, etc. Be sure to check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Major Nelson has announced the new Xbox 360 dashboard and walked through it on the on10.net website. You can see the video here.

The IIS team just updated the managed module starter kit for Visual Studio .NET. Be sure to hop on the IIS.net website and download the latest and greatest.

Show Notes:

Microsoft Live now has an add-in for Outlook to allow directions and maps to be added to Outlook appointments. You can even send the maps and directions along with the appointment. You can download the add-in by visiting http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT101641041033&Origin=HH101650561033&CTT=5.

One of the goals that Microsoft has really pushed for in ASP.NET 2.0 is saving the amount of coding necessary to perform common tasks such as data access. On a recent project, I needed the ability to filter the results on a GridView control after I returned the results from my data source. To accomplish this, I added a DropDownList and set the AutoPostBack property on the DropDownList to True. I added two values to the list; one that showed all of the results, and one that showed the filtered result set which in my case was a list of exceptions. I also added a SqlDataSource object called MySqlDataSource. I set the OnChange event to a subroutine similar to below:

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Private Sub FilterDropDownList\_Change(s as Object, e as EventArgs)  
    If FilterDropDownList.SelectedValue = "Filter" then  
        MySqlDataSource.FilterExpression = "MyColumn=1"  
    Else  
        MySqlDataSource.FilterExpression = ""  
    End If  
  
    MyGridView.DataBind  
End Sub

I added the sub MyGridView.DataBind to the subroutine because this subroutine occurs after the SqlDataSource object is created and the resultset is filled. In reality, you only need to perform the MyGridView.DataBind when the FilterExpression value is set to something other than "".