Hello, I'm   Jason

During my presentation tomorrow at Philly.net, I plan on providing a demo of the Microsoft Expression Web Designer. The event begins at 5:30pm with my presentation starting around 7:00pm. I will begin with my talk, “Understanding Membership and Profiles…

Another thing Scott Guthrie pointed out to me is that in order to get the Theme and the stylesheet to work across the site in design mode, I must set both the theme and syleSheetTheme properties in the web.config file. Otherwise, it will not render in the designer. Again, another thing I just realized. I must have been setting this on each page in previous projects or ignored the designer and assumed that it wasn’t supported.

I asked the ASP.NET team a simple question: Why/How can I get the design view to work when I set the master page file in the web.config instead of the page level. Scott Guthrie replied back with a link that didn’t necessarily answer my question, but provided some good tips and tricks for Master Pages. In short, it doesn’t appear as though it can be done. This is something that might make the Orcas list. I can’t believe that in using this for the past 2 years that I haven’t noticed this.

Have you downloaded the Microsoft Expression Web Designer or CSS Control Adapters yet? If not, what are you waiting for? Many designers have argued that Microsoft does not support CSS throughout the design/dev tools and also with rendering the controls. Well, that’s no longer the case. You can now design using Microsoft Expression Web Designer using built-in CSS templates. You can also use CSS Control Adapters to convert the table-based controls such as menu and treeview to a CSS control.

Microsoft has been working with a few other companies creating a “Center for Information Work.” Here are some photos from CIW: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/ciw/gallery.mspx. However, this week they released something even cooler. There is a new monitor that companies are developing to “wrap around” your workstation. Here is a picture from eWeek:

Scott Guthrie has just posted a cool tutorial on building a website using LINQ which can now be downloaded. If you haven’t downloaded LINQ yet to try it out, be sure to do so. LINQ will be fully integrated with the next version of Visual Studio.

I just noticed that Microsoft has released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) for the Expression Web Designer. The Expression Web Designer allows designers to build standards-based Web sites, includes sophisticated CSS-based layouts, includes extensive CSS formatting and management, and provides rich data presentation. You can download it now and report any bugs to the team using http://connect.microsoft.com/.

Scott Watermasysk and Don Demsak (DonXML) are putting together the 2nd New Jersey Code Camp to be held at the Microsoft office in Iselin, NJ on Saturday, June 3rd. I spoke at their first code camp and unfortunately will not be able to make the trip for …

The .NET Valley User Group will be holding its next meeting on May 24th, 2006 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. More details will be available on the .NET Valley website at a later date.

In case you were unaware, any website using Flash or any other embedded object that interacts with the user will now prompt the user asking them to “Click to activate this control.” It seems as though its going to be a big pain. If anyone found a way to get around this (although I’m sure its a security risk), short of uninstalling the update, let me know.