SharePoint Summit Token Conference Advertisement

Got an email the other day with a bunch of pictures to stick into my email signature, website, blog, slide decks, and etc for the SharePoint Summit in 2011 here in Toronto.  Since I’m content with the size of my signature, have no access to modify this website’s layout, and will never remember to stick them into any of my slide decks, here they are

Please go visit the site, see if you are interested in any of the presentations, and if you are, go!  It’ll be well worth the cost!

Managing Identity in SharePoint

Yet another presentation on the docket!  I submitted an abstract to SharePoint Summit 2011 and they accepted!  I will be presenting on SharePoint and how it manages Identity.  More specifically, how SharePoint 2010 uses WIF to handle Claims based authentication and Federation.

Here are the details

Event: SharePoint Summit 2011, January 31st 2011 – February 2nd, 2011

When: 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. February 1st, 2011

Where: Four Seasons Hotel, Toronto

Abstract: Managing identities within an organization is relatively easy. However, as business changes, we need to be able to adapt quickly. Identity is something that often gets overlooked in adaptation. In this session we will discuss the Windows Identity Foundation and how SharePoint uses it to adapt easily to change.

Link: http://www.sharepointsummit2011.com/Toronto/conference_day2.htm#session_7_3

Presenting a TechDays Local Flavours Track Session!

Earlier this morning I got an email from John Bristowe congratulating me on being selected to present a session for the local flavours track at TechDays in Toronto!  This bumps up my count to 2.  Needless to say I am REALLY excited.

I was a little disappointed to find out there weren’t any sessions on the Windows Identity Foundation, so that just meant I had to submit my own to the local flavours track…and they accepted it!  Here are the details:

October 27, 3:40 PM to 4:45 PM

Breakout | LFT330: Windows Identity Foundation Simplified: All the Scary Things Made Un-Scary

The Windows Identity Foundation helps simplify user access for developers by externalizing user access from applications via claims and reducing development effort with pre-built security logic and integrated .NET tools. This presentation is an intimate discussion on the basics of the Windows Identity Foundation and its claims model. In this session, you’ll learn how to refactor an existing sample set of applications to use WIF, to connect identities to the Cloud, and to remove the burden of managing multiple disparate user stores.

Location: Metro Toronto Convention Centre - South Building (255 Front Street West, Toronto)

Room: TBA

Proceedings from the Crypto 2010 Conference

Originally found on Bruce Schneier’s blog.  All credit to him…

Springer-Verlag publishes the proceedings, but they're available as a free download for the next few days.

Interesting read.

Putting the I Back into Infrastructure

Tonight at the IT Pro Toronto we did a pre-launch of the Infrastructure 2010 project.  Have you ever been in a position where you just don’t have a clear grasp of a concept or design?  It’s not fun.  As a result, CIPS Toronto, IT Pro Toronto, and TorontoSQL banded together to create a massive event to help make things a little more clear.  To give you a clearer understanding of how corporate networks work.  Perhaps to explain why some decisions are made, and why in retrospect, some are bad decisions.

Infrastructure 2010 is about teaching you everything there is to know about a state-of-the-art, best practices compliant, corporate intranet.  We will build, from the ground up, an entire infrastructure.  We will teach you how to build, from the ground up, an entire infrastructure.

Sessions are minimum 300 level, and content-rich.  Therefore:

Well, maybe.  (P.S. if you work for Microsoft, pretend you didn’t see that picture)

Pictures from Techdays and FailCamp in Toronto

After getting my camera back from Mitch Garvis after Techdays and FailCamp in Toronto, I decided to upload photos from the events, and to my surprise there were some pretty good shots.  Here is what I came back with:

Presenting at Techdays 2009!

Still working out session details, but it looks like I will be presenting in Ottawa and Montreal for Techdays 2009.  I will be loitering around at the Toronto event soaking up all the techie-goodness, so come find me at any of the three events.  We can talk shop, shoot the breeze, or just mill about having a good time.

I promise I won’t embarrass anyone.  Except maybe myself.  But that’s a warning for all occasions.

Here are the dates of the events across Canada.  Buy your tickets before the early-bird deal runs out!

The Early Bird price is $299.  The regular Price is $599.

I will post more on the sessions I will be presenting at a later date when I get the full details.

See you there!

Techdays 2009 – VIP Pricing

As budgets get tighter, Tech·Days is the perfect way to get the Tech·Ed experience without the travel expense, with two days of skill-strengthening education to help you position yourself for success by:

• Learning the technology—with a customizable agenda from over forty sessions across five technical tracks on both current technologies and new products, like Windows® 7 and Microsoft® Exchange 2010;
• Connecting with Experts and Peers—with Birds-of-a-Feather lunches and the new Windows 7 Zone, you'll have lots of opportunities to share your ideas with those who know the products best; and
• Apply what you learn—with a Learning Kit packed with products and resources so you can continue to grow your skills long after the event has finished.

Technologies discussed: Windows 7 Operating System, Windows Server® 2008 R2 operating system, Visual Studio® 2008 development system, Silverlight™ browser plug-in, Exchange 2010, Security/Management, and more.

If you want the VIP Discount use the promo code TD09Partner.

Early Bird: $299, Regular Price: $599

There is a good chance I will be presenting at one (or more) of these locations, so keep an eye out.  In the event that I don’t, I will definitely be enjoying the Toronto stop of the tour.  In either case, I will be there ready to learn, with a pocket-full of business cards.

Oh, and I’ll be leaving with a box/bag/shopping cart* of swag.

*Metaphorical shopping cart.  They are going to give away lots of awesome stuff.

What Makes us Want to Program? Part 3

In my second post I discussed my run in with ASP, and how PHP was far better.  I ended the post talking about an invitation to a Microsoft event.  This was an interesting event.  Greg and I were the only people under 30 there.  When that’s a 15 year difference, things get interesting.  Especially when you need your mother to drive you there…  The talk was a comparison between Microsoft based technologies and Linux based technologies.  The presenter was a 10 year veteran of IBM, working on their Linux platform, who then moved to Microsoft.  For the life of me I can’t remember his name.

His goal was simple.  Disprove myths around Linux costs versus Windows costs.  It was a very compelling argument.  The event was based around the Windows Compare campaign.  It was around this time that Longhorn (Longhorn that turned into Vista, not Server 2008) was in pre-beta soon to go beta, and after discussing it with Greg, we decided to probe the presenter for information about Longhorn.  In a situation like that, the presenter either gets mad, or becomes really enthusiastic about the question.  He certainly didn’t get mad.

Throughout the rest of the talk, the presenter made some jokes at mine and Greg’s expense, which was all in good fun.  Based on that, we decided to go one step further to ask how we can get the latest Longhorn build, at one of the breaks.  the conversation went something like this:

Me: So how do people get copies of the latest build for Longhorn?
Presenter: Currently those enrolled in the MSDN Licensing program can get the builds.
Me: Ok, how does one join such a licensing program?
Presenter: Generally you buy them.
Me: How much?
Presenter: A couple thousand…
Me: Ok let me rephrase the question.  How does a student, such as myself and my friend Greg here, get a the latest build of Longhorn when we don’t have an MSDN subscription, nor the money to buy said subscription?
Presenter: *Laughs* Oh.  Go talk to Alec over there and tell him I said to give you a student subscription.
Me:  Really?  Cool!

Six months later Greg and I some how got MSDN Premium Subscriptions.  We had legal copies of almost every single piece of Microsoft software ever commercially produced.  Visual Studio 2005 was still in beta, so I decided to try it out.  I was less than impressed with Visual Studio 2003, but really liked ASP.NET, so I wanted to see what 2005 had in store.  At the time PHP was still my main language, but after the beta of 2005, I immediately switched to C#.  I had known about C# for a while, and understood the language fairly well.  It was .NET 1.1 that never took for me.  That, and I didn’t have a legal copy of Visual Studio 2003 at the time.

Running a Longhorn beta build, with Visual Studio 2005 beta installed, I started playing with ASP.NET 2.0, and built some pretty interesting sites.  The first was a Wiki type site, designed for medical knowledge (hey, it takes a lot to kill a passion of mine).  It never saw the light of day on the interweb, but it certainly was a cool site.  Following that were a bunch of test sites that I used to experiment with the data controls.

It wasn’t until the release of SQL Server 2005 that I started getting interested in data.  Which I will discuss in the my next post.