Random thoughts from a certified geek!

I just saw U2 in LA – from my sofa in Seattle.. ;)

jasward — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:39:21 GMT

I’ve been to every U2 concert for the past 18 years, including concerts in Sydney, London, Dublin and perhaps the best of them all, Sloane Castle. So it disappoints me immensely that I’m unable to see them this time around in what looks like their best...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 released – with new and improved logo!

jasward — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:36:18 GMT

On Monday, we released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to the web! Aside from all the great new features and awesome UI, one thing I love in particular is the new branding, which you can see in the logos below. These...(read more)

Windows 7 and Office Communicator 2007

jasward — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:11:38 GMT

I recently installed Windows 7 Beta on my laptop, and whilst trying to run Office Communicator 2007 today I received this message: The event log showed this: Faulting application name: communicator.exe, version: 2.0.6362.76, time stamp: 0x4884242d...(read more)

LINQ To SQL Designer issues

jasward — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:19:13 GMT

Today I was trying to load a LINQ to SQL data context in my project and every time I double-clicked to open it I received this message: After trying to sort it out for a while I finally deleted the values under this registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages...(read more)

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 - Now Available!

jasward — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:28:25 GMT

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 update package went live on Microsoft Downloads. You can check out the release notes for details, although the team blog and the community site also have plenty of details. Power Pack 1 fixes the data corruption bug...(read more)

Buddy Knavery - Awesome Silverlight 2 Game

jasward — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 19:15:51 GMT

In case you missed it - Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is now available for download. To coincide with this release and demonstrate the power of Silverlight, a colleague on my team has written a great game called 'Buddy Knavery - Episode 1 : The Killer Riffs' ....(read more)

Accessing profile data from a web service

jasward — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:05:45 GMT

I recently had a need to access the Profile object from a web service which I was calling from a JavaScript method using ASP.NET AJAX. Looking around on the web people said it couldn't be done. Well never one to take no for an answer, I managed to play...(read more)

Searching generic lists

jasward — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:46:00 GMT

A nice article posted by Jeff on using predicates to search generic lists. This can also be applied to other methods, such as Exists and TrueForAll etc. If your experience is anything like mine, you probably have been using generics like crazy since .NET...(read more)

Allow myself to introduce... myself!

jasward — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:28:00 GMT

My name is Jason Ward and I'm a web developer working in the Developer Division at Microsoft. Whilst my team maintains it's own blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/dditweb/ , I thought it might be useful to maintain a separate blog for things I'm interested...(read more)