Jason Mauss' Blog Cabin

Because someone's got to do the dirty work

  • SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006 Launch Event - Join us!

    I've only received 2 emails from people so far saying they're interested so, that makes 3 of us. Since I don't make it into the city all that often, I'm not sure what kind of place would be best to meet at around the Moscone center. If anyone wants to join us and recommend a good place to meet (and maybe grab a bite for breakfast) I'm definitely open to suggestions on that.

    Perhaps I'll get white t-shirts printed up for everyone that shows up that say "I know Raymond Lewallen" in big bold black letters on the front. We could be the "I know Raymond" crew.

  • KB896688 pwns ActiveX

    Recently, after leaving all the boxes checked for my Windows update patches - a ton of my apps broke on me. I got to find out how much stuff I use is actually implemented using ActiveX Controls in an IE browser window - The Yahoo! IM LAUNCHCast player, some HP Printing software, and of course, the addictive flash internet games my wife and kids love to play.

  • Articles Table

    Recently I posted about what fields you might want to include if you were building a newsletters table so I thought somebody out there might find it useful if I posted information on how I'm building my Articles table. DevCampus is going to contain technical content in the form of articles so the Articles table is going to have quite a number of columns. This is your chance to provide feedback to me too, while I'm still building the database. I've visited various technical websites and looked at what they offer along with their articles to help form my ideas. Anyway, I'll get right to it:

  • Uninstall routines (in general) are teh sux

    Tonight I have decided to do some house cleaning on my hard drive. For me, this means uninstalling software that I don't use much or installed just to review a product. So I'm in Add/Remove Programs and I'm going down the list, uninstalling quite a few applications.

  • Amazon.com Web Services

    Since I'm an author and I like to write about technical stuff, I'd really like to be able to use Amazon.com's web services to display books on my DevCampus.com website that relate to the topic(s) covered in an article or whatever text is on the page. Sorta like the way Google AdSense works, but for books. For example, on an article page that covers XML Web Services, I'd like to see the top 4 or 5 search results for XML Web Services (w/ a cover shot image, associate link, price (maybe), isbn, star rating (maybe), etc.) in a simple ASP.NET user/server control package. From what I've looked at so far, it seems like Amazon.com Web Services are up to the task. And it's free to register as a web services developer - nice.