BinaryJam

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.

So its wednesday and Im actually posting lunch time so tyhis covers the morning sessions.

First two sessions were the changes in ASP2.0 by Scott Guthrie, another practised speaker and extremely knowledgable on his subject.

Well I think were our out of jobs. Scott pretty much built a portal with almost zero code behind, just drag and drop and set the properties We might end up coding Data Layers for the rest of our dev lives.

ASP2.0 has got some great features and heres some.

XSD Designer – Create STD’s complete with Adaptor class in the desinger and embedded into the one XSD file a complete DAL in a box
No more mangled HTML

This goes further the designer support in whidbey is awsome all the niggly bits that pissed you off in the past are gone
No more event wiring disappearing (there is no event wiring in the code behind at all now, not sure I like that!)
Select something in designer, its selected in the html code
drap on tools into html view
select a tag in html view and you have access ot the properties window
New controls that can bind to any IEnumerable object, imagine binding a datagrid straight to the Provider class in your DAL
This comes complete with edit and update to a Business object to.
Master pages done properly with designer support
Designer support for user controls not just a grey box
Membership capabilities with roles based on a provider model so you can plug it into xml, sql, AD, or your own custom store this was used to demonstrate Personalisation.
Templates and skins – combined with CSS to give you flexibility over design, and switchable at run time.
Common tasks button on every control in a drop down menu on the designer (this is cool)
NO MORE PROJECT FILE – Team development can be easier ( I supose this means we have to re-structure our SS yet again though)
Deploy the whole damn lot to a DLL, no aspx’s, no asmx’s, no html nowt but a dll (if you need to set file/directory permissions then proxies are created for this purpose that you attach permissions to, but if you dont need to do that just delete them)

And loads more too much to remember all the little details but many of the things introduced I could use immediately.

Next Session was the one touch deployment a nice safe session detailing the improvements to click once deployment, I think there will be some headaches in the admin side of this but none you could not overcome, there is even ability to bootstrap dotnet 2.0 via this method. It looks cool but needs testing in a corp environment to see howit reacts to security etc but it seems vastly improved from the last v1 release.

Well thats it for now off to another session I am going to Wojtek’s sessino after all I don’t know what to expect but here goes.

This was a chalk and talk session, I had no real idea what a C&T session was but it was interesting. Don gets up and asks a load of questions from the audience and writes them down, in xml!. He sorts them into topics and proceeds to answer them.

The basis for the piece was the messaging infrastructure of webservices and future indigo messaging. Some questions were

1 x vs y vs z
2. http vs DCOM MSMQ
In this one he talked a little of .Net remoting and mentioned about it not being secure (perhaps you could role your own etc) and that the team who wrote it were not very big and they essentially had to rewrite dcom in no time at all so the whole tcp-binaryformatter was not a protocol that has had many man years on it, in fact why not just use DCOM its had thousands if not millions of man years worked on it ( there was more detail but I cant do him justice)

He says he will post these details to his blog with the questions and answers.

So what I will comment on was the talk in general, this was alively talk by an extremely well practised speaker. It was thoroughly enjoyable and with all the SAO zelousness (is that a word) a breathe of fresh air, the talk he did on this he compared the topic of SOA vs OO to sexuality and needless to say the outcome was very funny. SOA is based on OO “and if your feeling curious about experimenting with SOA there are places you can go in almost every large city to do this”

A very clever man and a very funny man. So far and I have a feeling this will be the highlight of TechEd for me.

Well Yesterday was the day of the big KeyNote speech a lot of big screens and music etc. It was interesting as its the first of its kind that I’d attended. They used it to launch the “Express” version of VisualStudio (well little bits of it). This is essentially ASP2.0 and Vis2005 broken down into bits for the Hobbyist developer. Plus a free version of SQL2005 (essentially replacing MSDE, considering it writes to a MDB file why dont they just call it JET )

First Session of the day was the Building occasionally connected applications. This was presented by Rocky so a good speaker, although I later heard he wasnt booked for this and its someone elses session, well it was pretty seamless if it was. Building on the Smart Client App Block her went through th evarious scenarios that presented the disconnected problem and detailed how the App Block dealt with them. This is the hardest of the App Blocks I looked at it, because it builds on top of so many of the others. I downloaded FotoVision, wonder why they didnt us the AppBlock ?? Cos its too damn hard!!!

Next was what I thought was going to be about VS2005 and Yukon, WRONG, they used this session to introduce further the Express editions, now I did glean some useful info from this sessnio about whats coming, the XDS’s can now be designed with a built in adaptor which you can add methods to to essentially create DataObjects in the XSD designer, no more splitting out the XSD and the Provider code into seperate classes, wonder what happens if you XML serialize this object ??? But this session mainly annoyed me, not becuase of the content but becuase I feel that MS have wasted valuable time in getting these products to market instead of concentrating on VS2005 and Yukon, for the Hobbyist. Sorry but Hobbyists don’t pay the bills its the people here, if people want to learn this stuff do it the hard way the rest of us had to what makes you so special ?

C# best practices. This was split into a lot of “Whats wrong with this code” sections its was an enjoyable session despite the very few questions I got right, its hard to spot these things as so much of it you could put down to style, which is what I did I thought I would write that code like this, strangely enough the way I would write it was the correct way, but I didnt know why in some cases. Others I did I just nailed the IDispose section but then I harped on about it so much I should do.

Lastly Don Box but I gotta go and he deserves his own section.

Found this nugget in the .net247 with a link to the MS site, google didnt list it

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconrowstates.asp

In a nutshell :

switch(m_objDataTable.Rows[i].RowState)
{
case DataRowState.Deleted:
this.SettingsManager.RemoveAdminSetting(m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserId",DataRowVersion.Original].ToString());
break;
case DataRowState.Added:
strKey=m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserId"].ToString();
strVal=m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserName"].ToString();
this.SettingsManager.SetAdminSetting(strKey, strVal);
break;
}

Just found this

http://www.wayoftherodent.com/gd101/bs_paperarcade.htm

Cool