BinaryJam

Handy entry about number formatting

http://www.stevex.org/dottext/articles/158.aspx

Videos out, go visit Pat Helland’s Site under videos

You know that was such a long time ago and I could wait to get home to my family I didnt blog this day. But I have to mention that one session was excellent

“The Nerd, The Suit and the Fortune Teller”

Enough has been written about this onver the blogs already so I cant do it justice but I will post a link to the video if it comes out.

Building with blocks is Easy
Presenting is a little harder. I really dont need 20 minutes of lecture telling me how great Pattern and Practices are, I get it thats why I’m here at this session. So after that diatribe little time left for covering the blocks.
So OK Im convinced I need to start looking at the Data block, primarily for parameter caching, but Im not convinced about some of the others, but like the man said you can just use them to steal code from. The exception block is overarchitected and too complex also you need to raise an exception to log an error, exceptions are costly perhaps all you need to do is log the error and handle it, so a simple Logging tool might be better. Just not convinced. I will loook at the caching block as this may be a way to cache Person info for lots of people by limiting the cache and scavaging, I dont know very little time spent on this due to the stupid amount of time lost. Then light speed through the others, luckily I was a rockys session on smartclients so when I need to I will look at that one too.

.NET Versioning
Lots learned here again some I knew some I didnt but a well thought out presentation.

Whats New in ADO.NET 2.0
Not a lot by the talk we got, nothing wrong with the session but an hour and fifteen on a couple of items with lots of code to show when frankly I would have taken him at his word. A quick list though : DataTable now equal to DataSet, Dataset gets a binaryformatter for .net remoting, but as a few people have said DCOM/ enterprise services is faster. a new method on the DataTable to allow forward only reading at speed DataTable.DataReader (or something) so you can use a reader to walk a table (why ? apparently cos its faster then indexing). In Yukon you get side by side readers on one connection, huzzah!

So you think you know about web services.

Well after this Im damn sure I dont. There are so many things that you need to do that Visual Studio does wrong to talk to the rest of the world via web services. I think I will give up coding and go tend bar.

Good session not sure that in a .NET only environment that I work in I need to do anything other than what the tools do for me, but at least now I know where to start if I do want to go further afield.

Top 10 tricks for a killer Web App.
Great presentation, well it was rob howard so there you go, It was great to know that out of the 9 tips presented Im doing 7 of them, and the other two one I don’t use (reflection and reflection caching) and the other is the holy grail, sql notification. But I’ve learnt a trick to do that now so Im considering setting it up but its a big thing that needs discussion with our DBA to ensure low impact.

ASP.Net defences and countermeasure.
Well I think that I code a fair amount of security into our apps, a good one is to catch sql injection, useing stored procs goes a long way to ensuring this, provided you dont just exec in the SP. A lot of focus was spent on sql injection as its the baddest one that a dev can stop, we also covered session hijacking by grabbing cookies using cross site scripting and things like that, all usefull stuff and well presented, I could not help but laugh with every vunerability shown because I could name apps we’d written that would fall over with those hacks.

A great and enjoyable day with lots of good stuff. Sometimes it good to know your doing something right instead of all the stuff your doing wrong.