VS Live Party

We threw a party on Thursday night after VS Live Toronto to help blow off some steam. VS Live in Toronto was a good time. A few people agree.

  • Jay Roxe was one of the speakers and joined us for a night on the town.
  • Datagrid Girl Marcie Robillard too. Turns out we share some PowerBuilder history from back at her days with Anderson Consulting. Marcie was also one of the speakers. I watched her presentation to see if I could pick up any public speaking tips, but I left learning some technical things. A) You can do a DataSet.ReadXml and pass it an url, not just a filename. B) The file/url you point it at can be any reasonably formed xml document - not just a previously saved dataset. She loaded the RSS feed from the Code Project. Cool. In practice, an untyped DS does lots of inferring which can be problematic so stay tuned for a fully fleshed out tip on doing some typed DS loading of XML docs.
  • Mike Flasko has posted some pictures from VS Live. Mike is on the Imagine Cup Canadian winning team. Be sure to check out the sub folder from our party. Elisa Johnson and Jason Kemp also from the team were there. A very nice group of people I was glad to meet.
  • Thanks to Billy Hollis, Keith Pleas, Paul Yucknovic??, Rob Windsor, David Totzke, Chris Kinsman and of course the rest of the ObjectSharp clan for coming out on the town.

 

Building Maintainable Applications with Logging and Instrumentation

I'm doing this MSDN webcast in a few weeks

10/05/2004 1:00 PM - 10/05/2004 2:00 PM (EasternTime)

In this session we'll cover the world of logging and instrumenting your application. We'll discuss the various .NET framework components as well as higher level services as provided by the Exception Management Application Block, the Enterprise Instrumentation Framework and the Logging BLock. We'll discuss the various issues with persisting information in file logs, the event log, and WMI Performance Counters. We will also compare other alternative technologies such as log4net. We'll also discuss best practices for loging and instrumenting your application and provide some considerations for when and where it makes good sense to instrument your application from experiences in the field.

Update: The slides, samples and livemeeting recording links can all be found here.

Upcoming UG Meetings

Kate Gregory is starting a new UG in the east end in Oshawa. They are meeting Apr 20. The topic is an overview presentation of .NET. gtaeast.torontoug.net to register.

The regular meeting of the Canadian Technology Triangle meets next Tuesday Apr 20th as well. This special meeting is part of the MSDN User Group tour and the topic is The .NET Compact Framework. A special note that this event is not in its usual location, but rather at the Peter Benninger Theatre.  cttdnug.org to register.

ASP.NET Whidbey at CTTDNUG Tonight.

I'm presenting an overview on ASP.NET 2.0 tonight at CTTDNUG.

There isn't a great abstract on the site - and in fact, I will physically be unable to do the objectspaces stuff since the new version of VSNET CTP doesn't even have it in it anymore. Don't read into that - objectspaces will still be coming out - at some point. I should be able to give some nice objectspaces PPT's if the crowd is interested - but I'm guessing that Demo's are going to be more enjoyable.

So I am going to do my best ScottGu thrie impersonation and give a good solid demo lap around ASP.NET. IDE Improvements, Master Pages, the new datasource stuff, Site Navigation, Security, Personalization, SqlCaching.

Downtown Metro Toronto .NET UG Inaugural Meeting!

Finally a downtown user group.  First week of every month - and the first one is April 1st - no fooling..at 200 Bloor St. East (Manulife) at Jarvis. This is also the first date on the MSDN Canada .NET User Group Tour across Canada. There is also a raffle for an XBox.

The sad news is that this meeting is going to get cut off at the first 200 people - so register soon by sending an email to GrahamMarko@rogers.com.

http://www.metrotorontoug.com/

speaker: Adam Gallant
location: Manulife Financial Building 1st Floor 200 Bloor Street East Toronto

Better Web Development

In this session, we will focus on some fundamentals in web development, including a special drill-down on security and caching. We will cover an overview of the .NET security, and specifically important aspects in ASP.NET security and best practices. We will also cover, at a high-level, the caching mechanisms used by ASP.NET.

Upstaged by Ballmer

So it would seem I'm upstaged by Steve Ballmer who is coming to town the same day as the CTTDNUG presentation I was making about Whidbey.  So in the interest of the greater good - my talk has been postponed until Mar 31.

The “Ballmer Developer Briefing” is mostly about Security...if that interests you?

What do you mean “IF” - of course that should matter to you. It should matter to everybody. Writing secure code isn't just about logging in you know. It's about keeping your code safe and more importantly your end users machines and data safe and not allowing your software to act as a gaping hole into their system or data be it through spoofing or SQL Injection Attacks. Writing code these days is more of a liability than it ever has and we all have to be responsible - so do yourself and the rest of the world a favour and brush up on your knowledge of security. Either that, or hire a good lawyer.

I'm so convinced this is a an important event (and sorry that I had to cancel my presentation) that ObjectSharp is co-sponsoring a bus for members of the CTTDNUG that will travel to Toronto from Kitchener and back. And for those of you no where near Kitchener? Did I mention that parking is free?

See you there.

VSLive! 2004 comes to Toronto!

VSLive! Spring 2004 Toronto No details announced yet - but this is promising.

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks @ PDC

I'm hosting a birds of a feather Sunday night from 8-9pm at the Microsoft PDC. The topic is Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks. Hope to see you there - and grab a beer or three afterwards.

Code:
BoF29
Room: Room 402AB

MS Professional Developers Conference...

...here we come.

Myself and fellow ObjectSharpies DennisLee and DaveLloyd are heading out Saturday morning for the PDC in L.A. Stay tuned for our perspectives on Whidbey (essentially .NET 2.0), Yukon (SQL Server 2004?), and Longhorn (Windows 2005?). Key pieces of technology I'll be researching are Indigo (new web services framework) and Avalon (new windows forms framework).

I'm also looking forward to seeing MSBuild and trying to understand how it will compare, compete or compliment NAnt. I still don't see anything about the next version of Visual Source Safe - what's up with that?

If you are in town, look me up and I'll buy you a beer.