jcfiala

For those of you who normally read my journal for how my life is going on, you'll probably want to skip to the next post, which is going to be about haircuts and some odd luck that happened to me yesterday evening. The rest of this post is going to be a technical piece, or at least about technical pieces.

So, Denver DevDays 2004 happened in Denver yesterday, and I attended. I was fighting off a cold - had been the day before - and so a fair bit of the day involved sniffling, but even through the weariness and stuffiness, I could tell I was enjoying myself. So hopefully those of you without a cold will have enjoyed it even more.

I arrived at the Adams Mark hotel at about the right time, but wasted a little going to where the last Microsoft event had been held (in the second building) whereas this was being held in the first building, in the same area that Bouchercon had been held years ago. On arrival I happily scarfed down some orange juice, fruit, and a danish while scanning the crowd for people I knew. I noticed Kathleen Dollard, who attends the Denver .NET users group meetings and runs the Boulder ones, and also got to chat with another friend of mine from the group whose name I have sadly misplaced.

The goodie bag contents were truly impressive - in addition to the DevDays DVD, there was a Mobile Development Resource Kit, an Infopath Developer Resources Kit, a Whidbey DVD preview, two copies of the Visual Studio .NET professional Extensibility Resource kit (including the 60 day free trial of VS.NET), an ASP.NET Resource kit, a Technet Security guidance CD that I'd gotten last week at the MSDN security event, an AMD Developer Resource Kit, a Visual Basic .NET resource kit, and the SQL Server 2000 Evaluation kit with the reporting services. It was some weight. (But I've got to wonder - why not a C#.NET resource kit?)

The Keynote started off amusingly enough when the Microsoft advertisement on 'your passion is our product' crashed when it was almost finished. The speaker, Scott Johnson, managed to finish the commercial from memory, and then went on. A lot of this session was made of Case Studies with local companies, where IT people from the company came up and explained how switching to .NET had increased productivity, decreased turnaround time, and even cured their acne. :) But it was interesting, particularly with Interlink, who had gone from a J2EE shop to a .NET shop. Scott also went on about blogs, newsgroups, and other places to pick up information. They continued with a demo of the Infopath tool in Office 2003. (It sounded interesting, but as I did not win any free copies of Office 2003 during the day, I won't be seeing it for a while.) Then they talked about the SQL Server 2000 Reporting services, which looked interesting, and finished with warning us about how the XP SP1a was going to be removing the MSJVM.

The Web Development Track was interesting. The first session was rather high-ended, showing us a few security bugs - SQL insertion, cross site scripting, and the like, and talking briefly about how to protect yourself from hackers. It largely comes down to not trusting user input, and furthermore not trusting much else that you get back from the client - you've got to check each bit as if it were a bomb that might inconveniently explode during processing. The second session I started fading during, as my cold tried to catch more of my attention. Luckily this session continued with the last one in repeating things I had learned at a MSDN Security briefing the week before, in Golden. It was all good information, and given that maybe sixteen people had attended the MSDN show it certainly needed to be repeated, but I took advantage of my time by getting some water on my face and doing some walking to keep myself up.

Lunch was bagged, consisting of a sandwich, a cookie, a little (very little!) pasta salad, an apple, and some chips, as well as sodas or water. Already being up, I"d gotten to the room and picked up my lunch quickly, and ate it fast. While I was eating I saw some folks from CSS (my former employer) walk by, and jumped up to greet them. (They were walking out to get lunch, it seemed, and said we'd talk later.) I also ran into Mike, a friend of mine from roleplaying, and we chatted although he had people to find. One of the sponsors, Merant, was beginning a presentation to the folks in the lunchroom then, but I wasn't feeling like a presentation so I slipped out into another room and just sat quietly and played some Bejeweled. Considering that what I'd seen so far had been a replay of the Security Briefing before, I thought about switching tracks. But I figured that I could always watch the other tracks on the DVD later, and stuck with the web security.

Lunch over, the second two session started up. These seemed more detailed. David Yack did a lovely presentation on Defenses & Countermeasures, detailing a number of methods and resources for maintaining security. The theme continues - don't trust your input - but it seemed much more in detail. I sat in front, hoping to win a copy of Office (as he said he'd give one to someone who sat in front), but unfortunately it went to the guy next to me. Fourth session, examining the OpenHack 'hackerproof' application, was very interesting. OpenHack was an app that Microsoft had whipped up to win a contest, and they went over all the various methods used. I believe we've got that on the DVD they handed out, and I'm looking forward to checking it over in more detail.

The break after that was quite welcome. My energy was flagging again, but the application of a brownie and a cookie (along with diet coke) was able to jump start me again. I also got to run into Jason Turner and the others from CSS, and chatted amiably about things. Jason suggested that I apply to some of the clients of CSS, who sometimes need other coders to help out. I think the main reason I haven't done that is that I see that as a bit of a step backwards from where I am now. I'm done with CSS for now - the future is .NET and/or other companies.

The closing Keynote was more of an advertisement on ASP.NET, Whidbey, and the like. They showed us how to quickly whip together a data access webpage using the new ASP.NET controls, but I couldn't help but wonder how secure what they had whipped together was. They also showed how easy it was to package up .NET applications and deploy them would be with Whidbey - it was all very whiz-bang. They also showed off how Infopath would work with Visual studio, and that was pretty interesting. For C#, the information on refactoring seemed interesting - creating needed code for often used segments. Finally they showed us Yukon, displaying a teapot made of triangles that was stored as a triangle datatype defined in a dll/assembly. The data could even be acted upon by the same dll/assembly, and they used it to rotate the teapot - very interesting and very fast. They also talked about a native XML type, which would check XML in a field to make sure it was *good* xml, as opposed to just text.

So - all and all an interesting day. Many interesting things to think about, and fun CDs to investigate later. But what was interesting at the end was that once everyone had filled out their evaluations, they got shuffled and drawn for various prizes. Next to last, I got drawn for a copy of Merant Professional, a product by the sponsor, Merant. It's some sort of change management code, and it's fairly expensive. But what do I *do* with it? I don't know. Anyone with any suggestions are welcome to email me or leave a comment below.

So, if there's a DevDays 2005, I'm sure I'll attend, wherever I am.