Conferences
For I am a presenting whore
So after a year of not having any speaking to do I dropped myself in it and agreed to appear at NDC2011 in Norway, on my 41st birthday no less. I’ll be presenting an updated version of “Don’t get stung – an introduction to the OWASP Top Ten” and “A developers guide to encryption” which I never got to finish at DDD8 due to all those interruptions (*mutter*). Jon Skeet will also be there, so I’m going to have to ensure I spell encryption correctly this time, just in case he decides to swing by. Now, where can I...
The unemployment rate in Washington State as of May 2010 was 9.1%, and while this is slightly lower than the national average, there are still a great number of people going hungry. You can help! On Saturday, February 26th, the Saturday before the MVP Summit, GeekGive is organizing volunteers to work with Northwest Harvest in the Seattle Area. Join MVPs from around the world in this unique opportunity to give back to the community, network with your peers, and enjoy the Seattle area a bit more. You can sign up online – I have. Technorati Tags: MVP Summit,GeekGive,Northwest...
As if taking DDD to Ireland wasn’t foreign enough little Alex Mackey is organising DDD Melbourne (or rather ǝuɹnoqןǝɯ ppp). The call for submissions is now open, and as an encouragement for Aussie speakers I’ll buy, sign and send a copy of my book to the first speaker submission which includes a comparison of Alex to a particular fictional middle earth character … Like all DDD events DDD Melbourne is: Free! Run on a Saturday so no need to get time off work Open - sessions...
And the recording, with interruptions is here Barry Dorrans’ hijacked encryption session at DDD8 on Vimeo. I’ve also seen some of the feedback. Some selected highlights include Barry was more funny than usually! I don't think I laughed so much as when the videos began in this session. Barry will be sorely missed yet he still managed to complete his session and coped well with the barrage of mickey-takes and corrective outbursts from Jon Skeet. Peerless Barry Dorrans, but why were those guys wearing Stephen Hawking T-shirts...
A tight little bunch of nits … tightly nit bunch. I’d suggest if you’re waiting for the video of my DDD8 session you forget it. The good bits – the interruptions are below … Plip's Book Advert. Liam's Eulogy. Colin Mackay's new source of presentations. Craig Murphy insulting not one but two ex-UK community folks. It is with a heavy heart, for various reasons, that I’m boarding the Microsoft big white taxi from Heathrow this afternoon. Obviously I’m going to miss family, but the UK .NET community has been part of...
Today was DDD8, the last DDD event I can do because the rules exclude MS employees from speak and in 10 days time I will be in that category. I presented “A Developer’s Guide to Encryption” (PowerPoint/Sample Code) running through the main options developers have in .NET for cryptography. (The powerpoint deck should have all the spelling checks fixed. I swear those weren’t there on Wednesday when I finished … but I can’t see how anyone could have knobbled it, so I must have just been very fat fingered!) I’m rather sad to leave DDD behind, I’ve presented at...
So I get to have my swan song at the end of the month at DDD8. I’ll be presenting “A developer’s guide to encryption” and, if they arrive in time to Computer Manuals I’ll also be signing my new book – but I’m not sure if I will have giveaway copies in time - Amazon gets first dibs on physical books, and I only get limited free copies, the majority of which have been spoken for. It is worrying I’m in the last slot of the day … I don’t trust Gary Short for starters and silly string has...
And if it’s anything like last year will close tomorrow too. So put a reminder into outlook to visit the DDD site and register from 13:00 onwards. Last year all the places filled in four hours … (And this year it was full in 15 minutes. Next year maybe you’ll slip into negative time, but I won’t be allowed to present *sigh*) Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD8
The voting for DDD8 sessions is now open. Don’t let the fact that this will be the last DDD I am presenting at influence your votes in any way. Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD8
Finally DDD rears it’s head again, fighting through swine flu and coughing it’s way into life. This free one day conference will be held on the 30th January 2010. As always it’s community speakers only, no Microsoft staff will appear on stage! So if you have a burning itch to present then now is the time to submit your session. Technorati Tags: DDD,Developer Day,DDD8
This is just to let you know that Developer Day Scotland 2010 is now officially announced and looking for speakers (and there’s a new web site too). If you’d like to submit any sessions please head on over to the site and submit the sessions you want to give. http://scottishdevelopers.com/2009/11/20/developer-day-scotland-2010/ Technorati Tags: DDDScotland,DDD Scotland,McDDD
At DDD7 a lot of the sessions were videoed, but space to put them was hard to find. Until Ben Nunney stepped up, and now they’re all online … Craig has the details and the links. Technorati Tags: DDD,Developer Day
At the end of the month I’ll be in Dublin delivering “Stop your website being stung” – a guide to the OWASP Top Ten project and how you can secure your ASP.NET site against them at epicenter. There’s a few other MVPs speaking as well including Craig Murphy, the Black Marble boys Richard Fennell and Robert Hogg and that damned Jon “I’m going to answer everything on StackOverflow” Skeet. Two DDD Belfast speakers are reprising their topics, Alex Mackay is giving his standing room only session on VS2010 and Andrea Magnorsky is covering the Monorail MVC package. Tickets are...
After DDD Belfast came WebDD09 where I was presenting on the OWASP Top Ten Project (well I could hardly present at DDD Belfast, I was organising, that seems just a little too egotistical *grin*). You can download the PowerPoint [905kb] and the sample code [432k]. For the person who asked you can download Fritz Onion’s ViewState Decoder. For further reading on XSS Russ McRee republishes his Anatomy of an XSS attack article from the ISSA journal and NG Software have two PDFs, Advanced SQL Injection and More Advanced SQL Injection. With the added bonus of discovering coffee beans...
Well that was fun :) 150 people, 15 speakers, 3 organisers, 2 Microsoft folks and swag from Wrox, TechSmith, DevExpress, RedGate, Jetbrains and a special offer from Innerworkings for free ASP.NET MVC training. And then there was the Wrox lollipops… I have my pictures up on flickr; here is just a small sample. Obviously I’d like to thank all our speakers, our sponsors, the venue folks and of course Microsoft Ireland. And I’d like to thank our attendees, I hope you all got something out of it. You’ll be receiving details of the feedback web...
Couldn’t afford Mix? Didn’t like the idea of Vegas? Prefer the bright lights and stunning architecture of Reading, Berks, but want to see web content? Then WebDD on the 18th April is for you. Like all Developer Days it’s free, packed full of community speakers (including yours truly) Features include Get an independent view of Microsoft's new stuff Time with other web community types - it's run by the community for the community Choice of two tracks of technical content running throughout the day ...
The UK .NET Community’s favourite redheaded step child Phil Winstanley just emailed me to say I’ve been picked to talk at WebDD. I’ll be presenting “P0wn3d! (Or how to redirect your friend's website to katyperry.com)”. This takes the outings of my OWASP Top Ten Web Vulnerabilities talk to 5 outings over the next couple of months: WebDD09 18 April 2009 DDD Scotland 2 May 2009 VBug London 26 May 2009 DevEvening Woking 4 June 2009 Vista Squad London 17 June...
Ok so Scotland beat us to it by about 12 hours but we’ve pushed the agenda and DDD Belfast registration is now open! Remember it’s free – go sign up and prepare for a geek out Saturday … Technorati Tags: DDD Belfast,DDD,Techprechaun
MacDDD registration is open and you can register for a place right now. Oh and yes, I will be presenting … Technorati Tags: DDD Scotland,MacDDD
We’ve gathered the sessions and now it’s your chance to directly influence your conference. Wanting to come to DDD Belfast? For a limited time you vote on the sessions you want to see, so get to it, vote and spread the word … Technorati Tags: DDD Belfast,Techprechaun,DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper
The session voting for SQLBits is now open. If you’re a SQL person in the UK you have a grand total of 83 sessions from 37 speakers to vote select for this free conference. (And if you’re a speaker there’s still time to submit for DDD Belfast) Technorati Tags: SQLBits
After Galway last year we’re taking DDD to Belfast this year and you can be involved. The call for speakers is open and awaiting your submissions. Like all DDD events there here will be NO Microsoft speakers presenting, just speakers from the .NET developer community; although we will have many of the Irish Developer Platform Evangelists (DPEs) on hand to help out and chat to attendees. The day is put together by the community for the community, in other words you. We thank our sponsors who have helped make the event possible: Microsoft have graciously sponsored the event!...
Well I didn't manage to get socks stuck on the projector this time around. The slide deck and demos are available for download. Every DDD session this year has been filmed; so if you missed it watch the DDD site for the video. Technorati Tags: developer day,ddd,ddd7
Well jiggle ma sporran 'n warm up the sheepsies Morag; DDD Scotland returns on the 2nd May 2009. We'll all be gaing to Gaslgie then; but didnae Connor say "There can be only one?" Aye, n its free as weel. Ay can keep me wedge fer me buckie. (Of course now I shouldn't submit a topic or two because I am going to get eggs thrown at me. Except eggs are expensive, so maybe not .... errr, how do I turn comments off on a blog post? Oh no ...) Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD Scotland,Developer Day,McDDD,DDS,JockDD,McDD
Yesterday I presented to a bunch of hungover VBug members; giving a gentle introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (if only all WCF applications were that easy). Thank you to all who attended and especially those who asked questions. Someone did ask about client and server communication; I'd point you (and I'm afraid I didn't catch your name - apologies) to my blog post on WCF callbacks. I've uploaded the slide deck and the (very simple) demonstration projects. Technorati Tags: VBug,WCF
The agenda is set, the waiting is over, registration is open full. If it's anything like last time you have about 12 hours to register before all the spaces are gone ... Update: Four hours later the spaces are gone. Sorry if you missed them. Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD#7
I got the email last night that my session Top 10 WCF Tips & Tricks was selected for DDD7. DDD sessions are voted on by potential attendees so it's always an honour to get selected; and this will now be the 7th DDD I've presented at. So put the date in your diary and come down to the Microsoft offices in Reading for a free, packed, Saturday of community speakers. What:DDD 7When:Saturday, November 22, 2008 9:00 AM to 5:00 PMWhere:MicrosoftThames Valley ParkReading, Berkshire RG6 1WG England Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD7,WCF
Developer Day voting is open and there are a large number of sessions you can choose from. A while back I threw out a challenge to the girl geek community to try to encourage more female speakers and we ended up with three potential speakers from the fairer sex, one from an MVP, Bev Hatchard who we persuaded to speak at DDD Scotland and is now bitten by the presenting bug, one from Chris Hart on virtual worlds and a bunch of submissions from Helen Emerson. Now the competition was going to end when voting ended; but as Bev...
As a way of attempting to encourage more women to submit sessions for DDD7 I decided that bribery a prize might help. All you need to do is submit a session, and present it if it’s selected and you could win a 1 year MSDN Team Suite subscription, worth just over £8500. Full details are on the London Girl Geek Dinners web site. (If none of your sessions are selected by the attendees I shall be drawing a name from the hat). So what are you waiting for? Think of a session; submit it. And while you’re at it talk...
One of the sessions I’ve submitted for DDD is "So you want to be a speaker"; which has the following abstract; Is being in the audience no longer enough? Do you long for the fame, the glory, the groupies that come with being a DDD presenter? Then come along to this discussion/Q&A panel with some of the UK’s top speakers; we’ll cover topics like "How do I get started?", "Am I good enough?", "Is bad feedback the best feedback?", "Powerpoint, is it the work of the devil?", "When good questions go bad", "My demo code worked earlier" and...
The call for speakers for DDD7 is now open; if would like to give a talk, whether short grok or longer presentation style, at DDD 7 on Saturday 22nd November 2008 please complete the short form. We are opening the form early to give everyone a chance to think about a topic that you are passionate to share with the community. So whether you are a regular speaker on the community circuit or just want to share your knowledge and experience for the first time with others - we welcome you to submit your session proposals. A DDD event is...
FEST08 the annual NxtGenUG one-day event takes place at Microsoft Reading on Thursday 12th June (just a few days after my birthday, so bring presents). As ever it’s going to be an action packed day with great content from the likes of Mike Taulty ,Oliver Sturm , Dave Sussman and other top speakers. There is a cast iron guarantee that there will be no Information Card sessionsbut there will be swathes of swag and prizes and pizza (it wouldn’t be a nxtgen event without those). There are a few places left; it’s free to all NxtGenUG members and a mere...
Speaking is a serious business .... Technorati Tags: DDDIE,DDDIE08,Chinposin
Yesterday I gave a presentation on WCF at DDD Scotland; the presentation and sample code is available for download. Feedback included "a most enlightening talk." "excellent delivery/pace/humour/depth on a topic of interest" "very practical" "Good quality slides; Alive for this time of the morning" (Well I was first on!) Technorati Tags: DDD Scotland
Next month I will be presenting at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference on "Information Card - Beyond the HTML Page" Information Card promises to provide a secure way for users to provide login and identity information and there are plenty of samples on how to use it for web site logins. But what if you want to go beyond that? What if you want to use it in rich client software? What if you want to be a managed identity provider? This session aims to cover how you can take information cards beyond web sites and onto the desktop...
nxtgen Oxford has a bunch of events to take you into summer; What:Even More Mobile with Roger WhiteheadThis talk will builds on the introductory talk Roger gave last year on Windows Mobile Development. This new talk will cover general issues when developing Windows Mobile applications as well as demonstrating specific features of .net Compact Framework 3.5 and Windows Mobile 6. Roger will use Visual Studio 2008 during his presentation and will also cover the important new features this offers for Windows Mobile developers. Roger will cover the basics of form design, navigation, data handling, unit testing and deploying Windows...
Craig points out that Plip has let the cat out of the bag with regards to Techrepchaun, the first DDD Ireland. So on May 3rd the usual DDD crowd, with added Europeans descend upon Galway and attempt to drink the country dry, errr, I mean, bring DDD to Ireland. As with all DDD events it’s free, held on a Saturday, there are no Microsoft speakers and we try to mix up experienced speakers with willing first time victims. The agenda is available, although subject to change. The major difference from UK DDD events is an entire track dedicated to...
There’s a range of events coming up in the next few months; In February we’ve got Guy Smith-Ferrier coming to nxtgen Oxford to talk about Astoria ADO.NET Data Services, and a nugget from a new speaker, Marc Gravell on adding operators to generics. If you want to come along please register first, it makes my life easier. What:Ahhh, Ahh, AstoriaThe emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has brought new opportunities and caused us to solve old problems in new ways. AJAX and Silverlight applications need read/write access to data and business objects without performing full page refreshes and without dumbing down...
DDD heads north of the border on Saturday 10th May, 2008 for Developer Day Scotland, at the Glasgow Caledonian University. The call for speakers is now open (and again I was first, hah, I beat Gary Short again on his home territory this time!) If you’ve been aching to present but could never get down to civilisation the south of England now is your chance to shine. What:Developer Day ScotlandDeveloper Day Scotland is a community event, run by community for community, which is based upon the highly successful Developer! Developer! Developer! community conference events.When:Saturday, May 10, 2008 9:00 AM to...
Another Developer Day has been and gone, with mixed success for me. This time around I took part in two sessions, Colin Mackay's recruitment session and one of my own on WCF. The recruitment session was fun, it’s always amused to appear beside Sarah, who refused to wear the fetching green polo shirt, despite having one in just her size (for those keep note we’ve had white, black, blue and magenta, never let it be said we’re not on the cutting edge of fashion). Questions were taken from the audience (and indeed some attendees appear to have come...
I’m making a flying appearance at TechEd this year talking about Infomation Card security token services and their implementation; for those interested the session is Windows CardSpace Case Study 1: Identity Providers – Experian (SBP05-IS) 8 November; 10:45 - 12:00 Room 131 I’ll be joining Steve Plank and Jim Lound from Experian on stage. The abstract for the session is as follows; Experian is in the Identity Business in a big way. Banks, Building Societies, Financial Institutions and governments use their identity validation services to validate the identities of potential customers. Experian will be one...
I give it 48 hours before every place is gone, so go, register, you know it makes sense. The agenda is also up; I’m up against Rich and Dave with Swaggily Fortunes. So, no attendees in my bit then! (It appears I was wrong; all places went in under 24 hours. So, no pressure then on us presenters. None at all. *cry*) Technorati tags: ddd, developerday
I received the email last night; I’m speaking at DDD again, this time on WCF in a presentation entitled Web Services; we don’t need no stinking web server Remoting is dead. Long live WCF. This session aims to cover the creation of web services with WCF, inside and outside of IIS, including one way and two way services, as well as contracts, faults, authentication, authorisation and security. I think I’ll try to sneak something CardSpace related in there *grin* As an added bonus I’m also sitting on the recruitment round table discussion sharing my personal thoughts on where candidates...
I attended sqlbits on Saturday (and was press ganged into helping out as a room monitor and grok talk organiser). So I donned the obligatory conference polo shirt and mingled with the crowd. After a while some random strange man approached me offering Channel9 guys. Ok, so it wasn’t sweeties but I ignored the advice my mother gave me as a child and followed him back to his car .... And returned with an arm full of Channel9 guys, which were thrown out into the lunch crowd later in the day .... The conference was good; learnt more...
Because the event is for the community and by the community we are currently looking for speakers who would like to present. You don’t need to have spoken before, but do want to share your experiences and knowledge of .NET with other developers. The speaker proposals area for DDD6 is now open. The details for the event can be found on the Developer Day website and you can see what subjects have been covered previously on there too to get a few ideas. And for the fifth event in a row I was first to submit. I had...
Saturday Oct 6th sees the first SQL Community conference (SQLBits - (http://www.SQLBits.com), 20 sessions in 4 tracks (Business Intelligence, DBA, Development and Katmai) on a Saturday in Reading at a cost of £0. That’s right, nothing, nada, or in SQL terms IS NULL (ok, not really, I know NULL means no data, not a decimal/money value of 0, but come on, it’s marketing people). Full registration is now open, places are going fast, but there’s only room for 350 people. You need to register on the http://www.SQLBits.com site and then select the 10 sessions (http://www.sqlbits.com/information/PublicSessions.aspx) you would most like to...
Another conference outing for my CardSpace presentation, this time at the VBUG Conference in October. What:VBUG Conference 2007When:Wednesday, October 17, 2007 9:00 AM to Thursday, October 18, 2007 5:00 PMWhere:Microsoft UK CampusThames Valley ParkReading, West Berkshire RG6 1WG I see my stalking colleague Gary is also appearing (ever since he started he’s been talking at the same conference I have .... hmmm .....) This time we don’t clash either so I can finally attend one of his presentations! Technorati tags: Cardspace, VBUG
Just to tease Gary, who posted his DDD feedback scores I can’t let that past, especially as it looks like he’s trying to overtake my role as main speaker and work (Gary, there’s only room for one overfed ego my boy!) Overall Knowledge Presentation Content 4.3 4.8 4.4 4 To those who fed back my thanks; but there is a point to this rather than teasing Gary, the detailed feedback is useful. Three people filled in comments section; Well presented, useful, filled in some gaps in my knowledge. Good style, good level of detail. I have...
Today saw DDD5 and deliver of my updated presentation on InfoCard CardSpace Information Card, which was rapidly updated this morning to include the new Information Card logo, and the ASP.NET Kit, as announced by Mike Jones a couple of days back. I did look at the HTML kit as well, but, err, the documentation is somewhat lacking. I think I know what parts of it down, but I'm still at a loss to explain why I need a toast style popup. The reaction to the logo was rather muted by developers and also derision from a designer in the...
I say "umm" a lot. The sessions at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference were recorded. You can see mine on askasqlguru.com (stop laughing Tony, I know I'm not a SQL guru, Niall Flanagan is and asked Chuck Boyce to host them). Maybe it's the whole listening to your own voice thing, but I've never seen myself present and I'm cringing. A lot. I can only apologise to those who attended and didn't enjoy it or take anything useful away. Technorati tags: IMTC
The booking site for DDD#5 is now live (amusingly someone discovered the URI and its spreading virally; there's there wasn't even a public agenda at the time; it appeared about an hour later). I had booked a space just in case but was delighted to discover that I will be speaking again, on CardSpace. So my collection of DDD speaker shirts grows again, one for every DDD (excluding the first one where we didn't have any); now I need to start planning for DDD#6 .... Technorati tags: DDD, DDD5 DDD#5, Developer Day, Cardspace
It was the NxtGen Fest07 event yesterday; but client work meant I couldn't attend, which also meant I couldn't pick up my award for Best Presentation, Oxford. Chris Seary picked it up on my behalf and (I am told) attempted to give my acceptance speech in an Irish accent (below). Someone please tell me you videoed it. Obviously would have loved to be there today; but unfortunately I’m filming the next Bond movie in the Bahamas right now, as you can see from the back drop on this video link. Actually I don’t know what the award...
A while back the call went out for a .NET speakers who would come to Ireland; and now the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference has been finally announced by Claire Dillon. Yes, I am speaking, giving my "Hacking Web Sites for Fun & Profit" talk (which doesn't appear to be as trendy as all the other topics, but Dominick Baier beat me to a CardSpace presentation!). I'm not sure this counts as an international engagement for me as I was born north of the border, but it does give me a a birthday cake, as my birthday is the day after and...
You can now vote on sessions you want to see at the next Developer Day. It's rather funny to see an entire Security section manned by my colleague, Chris Seary, and myself, I should have submitted more than one session just to try to catch up with Chris I hope to cover CardSpace, a talk I originally gave at WebDD except this time I won't be up against ScottGu <g> Richard Costall described the session from WebDD thus; I ended up being lured into a talk on CardSpace by Barry Dorrans. His session was described as the Overflow room for Scott's...
Last Thursday saw Chris Seary and myself presenting at the Microsoft offices in sunny (yes, really) Edinburgh for the Scottish Developers Group. Thanks must go to Craig and John for organising. I presented an updated (trendy white on black) "Hacking Websites for Fun & Profit", "Securing ASP.NET Websites and Applications" and "An Introduction to Windows CardSpace". An audience member (sorry, I didn't catch your name) asked me to put together some resource links on SQL Injection, XSS and so on. Probably the best breakdown of SQL Injection is Chris Anley's PDF, "Advanced SQL Injection In SQL Server Applications". The XSS FAQ is...
Yes, I got to conferences I don't speak at (although this time I'm a helper monkey). Time is running out to register at the discount rate (tomorrow); or of course you could simply join the Next Generation User Group and come for FREE! It'll be worth it for the swag, I emptied the DPE cupboard of goodies last night ... What's FEST07 all about? It’s all about “Into The Future …”. We’ll start the day in the present, looking at Vista, and then we’ll jump forward a few months to take a look at LINQ, a great and innovative...
The call for submissions for Developer Developer Developer 5 are open. I've already put my first submission in (can I beat Oliver & I think Benjamin who last time around, if my memory serves submitted rather a lot). More importantly, was I first to submit again? I plan to talk on CardSpace again; extending the presentation I gave at WebDD to cover managed cards and writing your own security token service. Yummy. [Edit: 29-Mar 07:30] Yes I was the first to submit yet again. I think that's 3 times in a row now. Vote for my session; I promise...
Everytime I speak at conferences or usergroups I end up using the same biography, I'm bored with it, it's so formal, staid, pinstriped and, well, as anyone who has seen me present that doesn't fit. So, I am offering you, dear readers, the chance to rewrite my biography. One of my fellow BBS inhabitants suggested; Barry's no nonsense approach to MS Veebelfetzer 2.4 installation and tuning is a refreshing change from the norm. You'll be dancing in the aisles as he explains the differences between MS Veebelfetzer 2.4 and its competitors through a song 'n dance routine straight out...
After the last Developer Day John from the Scottish Developers Group approached myself and my colleague Chris Seary about taking our knowledge (and my unorthodox presenting style) north of the border. It took a little organisation but it's finalised. On the 12th April, at the Microsoft Offices in Edinburgh we will be presenting the "Web Security Conference Day for Windows Developers".
Attendees get a full Barry morning experience, with the now infamous "Hacking Websites for fun and profit" session at 9:00 (what a way to start the day); and "Securing ASP.NET Communications and Applications" at 11:00.
The afternoon sees Chris presenting "Code Access...
Richard has announced the first nxtgenug conference (and no, I'm not speaking *sulk*). nxtgenug have obtained Rafal Lukawiecki for the day, (voted top TechED speaker for about 7 years running). They plan to start with the usual keynote and end with another infamous swag give away in the shape of a game show. Anyone who has seen Richard and Dave "perform" know that attendee's are in for a treat. One other session which is not on the site will be a session from Microsoft Research. Richard isn't telling me what it's about; so it's a big surprise for me too. So a bit different...
So I presented "An Introduction to CardSpace" earlier today at WebDD, with poor Pat acting as a foil in my attempts to get the audience to laugh.
The more I attempted to draw the presentation materials together the more I am coming to view CardSpace as unfinished. Aside from crashing when I cancel sending an information card the CardSpace paradigm leaves open questions. The main sticking point for me is around managed cards. It's all very well saying that trusted parties will issue managed Information Cards, but how do you measure the trust you should apply to those cards? Passport failed...
So whilst we sit and wait for our change to be overflow speakers at WebDD ("Hi, I'm not Scott Guthrie") I suggested a little experiment. In the speaker's lounge, replete with fluffy pillows there were three boxes of free t-shirts. Plip and I took two t-shirts from each box and placed them on the shelves in the coffee area outside the conference rooms then quickly retired to watch what happened. As the first session exited we had our first sniff, an attendee came up and closely examined all three shirt types, looked around, then moved a Telerik shirt onto a...
I'm currently doing the same code for my CardSpace presentation at WebDD this Saturday (I have five days to go, believe me this is well prepared to some presentations I've done) and I've noticed there's a lack of branding around CardSpace. One of CardSpace's advantages over, say, OpenID, is that it presents a consistent user interface in the form of the client identity selector but there are no graphics or suggested styles for login pages that utilise it.
Kim Cameron's blog uses a picture of Elastagirl and asks you to login using an "Info Card", the Microsoft CardSpace sandbox uses a gray...
BarCamp2 London has been announced. For those who've never heard of a BarCamp think of it as a geek anarchist conference. There's no agenda. There's no real plan. Turn up on the 17th of February, sleep over somewhere till the 18th with your laptop and signup to present on the day. And maybe people will come over and hear you speak. Maybe not.
How useful will it be? Well unfortunately you can't see any of the presentations from the last event; there's no pointers to them. Will you get a good reception if you want to wander off piste into talking about non-FOSS stuff? Will...
WebDD registration is now open; you can register online here.
Phil Winstanley announced that the WebDD Backnetwork Registration is open. It might give you something to do whilst you wait for general registration to open (although if you hunt around you might find that a particular UK mailing list already has the registration URI. As a speaker I received my invitation to the Backnetwork last night. I will freely admit I went "huh". Basically it's a social networking site (yes, I can see you roll your eyes from here) especially for the even. It crawls technorati and flickr looking for posts tagged with WebDD. It makes a lot of things available in microformats, which will...
Not content with having DeveloperDay twice a year at no cost there's now a new UK event, WebDD. Like DDD it's free, held on a Saturday at Microsoft, the 3rd of February to be precise. This free conference features some rather stunning speakers including ASP.NET's very own Scott Guthrie, Dave Verwer of the Ruby world and two guys from Telerik, Hristo Deshev and Zhivko Dimitrov. Oh, and me. Again. (Yes, my name isn't spelt right on the speaker list yet, but frankly the idea of meeting Scott Guthrie overshadows that by a long shot! [edit] five minutes and it's fixed, heh.) The...
So the Channel9 camera made an appearance again in the UK, this time at DDD4 and yes, being the media whore that I am, I appeared, this time with Sarah to keep me in check [watch]....
Well in check up until the poor MS guys got called away and we "borrowed" the camera...
Video: DDD4 : "Borrowing the C9 Camera"
A slightly more relaxed Developer Day yesterday, with calming blue speaker polo shirts. This time I covered "Security ASP.NET Applications and Communications" which attempted to give an overview of ASP.NET's security model, guide the choices made when choosing authentication and authorisation strategies, a brief look at how to secure communications between tears and some how tos supporting the options I had covered previously. The slides and notes are available.
I ended up with a full session, with a couple of people sitting on the floor at the sides of the room, always quite intimidating and ego boasting at the same time....
Stealth disco;
Bad Jen, naughty Jen!
A bit late to the game, although I did get told this last night, but registration for DDD #4 is now open. For those of you who haven't a Developer Day before get signed up, the 300 places go fast.
It's a free event, held on Saturday 2nd December at the Microsoft Offices in Reading. The speakers are not Microsoft employees, but are drawn from the community. As usual I've managed to con my way into presenting, this time on "Securing applications and communications in ASP.NET". If the topic is of interest now is your chance to influence the content, leave...
More presentation dates for your diary
"Hacking Websites for Fun and Profit": VBug London, 13th September
"Building ASP.NET Web Controls": VBug Reading 21st September
"Building ASP.NET Web Controls": NextGenUG, Coventry, 16th October
"Hacking Websites for Fun and Profit": VBug Annual Conference, 17th-18th October
Feedback from the last presentation of "Hacking Websites for Fun and Profit"
"Excellent presentation, thoroughly gripped all the topics and scared me witless"
"Very entertaining"
"Very informing & interesting"
Feedback from the initial presentation of "Building ASP.NET Web Controls"
"He's Mad - loved it ! Don't change a thing."
"Very good session ... very popular and the room selected wasn't big enough"
"Great overview...
Microsoft UK's new Chief Security Advisor, Ed Gibson is on the road in a series of free events organised by the Scottish Developers and NextGenUG. The events are trying to raise awareness of the issues surround computer security for both business and developer communities.
Ed's new role comes on the heels of his retirement from a 20-year career as a Supervisory Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). During this period, Gibson was a recognized expert in investigating complex, international money laundering schemes, asset identification and confiscation, and intellectual property theft. While assigned to FBI Headquarters, Washington, DC, Ed...
It's been a busy weekend, what with sunburn and Developer Day #3. Resplendent in a fetching maroon / wine speakers shirt (which matched my sunburnt face for colour, no photos yet, I had thought Simon, as ever, did snap one, but it turns out he left his camera in the car) I attempted to rattle through the basics of developing asp.net server controls. Rather than being slide based the presentation was code based and it's not until you sit in front of 60 or so people, standing room only, that you realise how fat your fingers are and how...
The next Developer Day agenda is up and sign ups are open. Once more I get to bounce around in front of an audience on Saturday the 3rd June This time around I'll be talking about building ASP.Net Controls. I hope to demonstrate how easy it is to build server controls, littered with examples.
(And for those of you who tell me I should start writing here again I am still struggling to find a suitable voice. I know it's been over 6 months, but what can I say, it's a struggle, but I do appreciate the emails and concern. Thank...
As the comments on the second Developer Day start to hit blogs around the country it is rather ego inflating to see my name in "lights". Last time we were scored by attendees and I assume this time we'll be scored as well, although as I missed the speaker briefing due to the traffic jam at the entrance to the Microsoft Campus I completely forgot to remind people to fill in their score sheets. This may not be a bad thing though because, as usual, I got carried away <g>
The problem with scoring sheets though is you don't get any...
Well that was fun! First there was the traffic jam getting into the Microsoft Campus 45 minutes before it starts, but 15 minutes before the speaker briefing (sorry Melita!) and managed to sit down with Annie who was highly amused to be called a big name speaker. I was highly amused when, upon booting her laptop the hard drive went rather weird and error messages complaining about missing system directories appeared. Panic ensued. I volunteered to dash home to get my identical work laptop, and we could put her drive in an external usb enclosure and copy files. As she...
Good (?) news; the next Developer Day agenda is up and yet again you have the chance to listen to my dulcet tones on Saturday the 22nd October. This time around I'll be talking about the new build engine for the .net framework, MSBuild.
Distributed as part of the framework it provides a customisable, extensible, open (errr, don't start GNU people, please) build engine which you can use with or without Visual Studio. It even provides the underpinnings for Team Build, part of Team System. So come along, learn about it, learn how to extend it and watch me, as ever,...
So DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper is done and dusted. It was the first time I've given a presentation on how to hack web sites; I now await the results of the speaker score sheets. As if presenting wasn't stressful enough <g>. Unfortunately I didn't have as much time for questions and answers as I would have wished, but the wireless mic was rather fun. For those that are interested and can't wait till my presentation appears on the conference web site (Craig is stuck in a hotel with just a modem connection) I've uploaded the powerpoint deck and sample code.
Remember don't try this...