February 2007 Blog Posts
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...
March 7th sees Benjamin Mitchell venture in Windows Workflow a programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications. WF radically enhances a developer’s ability to model and support business processes. It also sees a nugget from Geff Lombardi on the Background Worker capabilities in .NET 2.0. As usual we're hosting it in the RM buildings in Abingdon, sign up for the event on the nxtgenug site.
At CES this year his Billlness sprung a surprise on the audience, Windows® Home Server. The product aims to act as a central sharing, backup and remote access machine that you can sit in a corner and forget about. It forgoes the Windows Server UI in favour of something smaller, lighter and easier for everyone to use.
A couple of weeks back Microsoft opened it up to beta applications and I managed to get a slot. An overnight download of a 1.5Gb ISO image, a trip to PC World to get a small box to run it on...
Via Hugh I went to see a preview of 300 last night, followed by a Q&A with the director Zac Synder. The film was billed as ... a ferocious retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. The film brings Miller's ('Sin City') acclaimed graphic novel to life by combining live action with virtual backgrounds that capture his distinct vision of this ancient historic tale. I loved how incredibly stylish Sin City...
Phil picks up ScottW's Quick Tips for ASP.NET and beats him around over his comment to never use the <asp:label> control, but misses the weirdest thing about <asp:label>, it has two faces; due to backwards compatibility for ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1. In previous versions of ASP.NET the label control was used to dump text into your page, surrounded by a <span> tag. In 2.0 it finally became equivalent to the <label>, but that's hidden away. If you look at the MSDN documentation the control is described thus; Represents a label control, which displays text on a Web page. which isn't what...
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...
SubText 1.9.4 has added support for displaying the category list for your posts. By default this is not included in your skin, adding new functionality to your layouts without your permission is obviously bad (and the control adds a couple of new queries against the database, something you may want to test before rolling out). So you need to update your skins (and this generally includes the default skins included with the software) to include the new control, should you want it. In order to enable this you need to edit 3 files in your skin controls directory ; day.ascx...
Subtext 1.9.4 is available for download from sourceforge. Steve has the breakdown of what's changed; for me the important fixes include 1586661 - PreviousNext.cs double-encodes titles 1596444 - Comment count reset to zero after upgrade 1624536 - Permalink incorrect on Comments control 1629555 - XSS vulnerability in the Admin - Referrers page New features include 1197046 - Category/ies Displayed In Post 1263669 - Implement Google SiteMap Page If you're upgrading you should note that Google SiteMap support does need a change to your existing web.config file. In the HttpHandlers section...
I've been asked to present my WebDD presentation "An Introduction to CardSpace" at VBug, Cambridge on the 6th March at Anglia Ruskin University. For those who couldn't make WebDD the talk was outlined as
Windows CardSpace is a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website. This talk will cover how CardSpace works, how it can be used within ASP.NET applications and how you can implement CardSpace logins on your own web site.
Feedback from the presentation...
Wednesday 21st February sees both the nxtgenug and girly geek dinners. For the nxtgenug, Oxford branch, we have Ben Goetlz, taking us on a tour of BizTalk. Ben has been rather shy in his speaker biography and failed to point out he was one of the co-authors on the first BizTalk 2006 book out there. The London Girl Geek Dinners this month have Jeff Barr from Amazon talking about web services. Amazon are also sponsoring the event, so there will be a few bottles of wine knocking about for consumption. Remember if you're male you must be invited by a female...
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...