I do it, so my site should be safe, right? Well it turns out that the answer is "wrong"!!

One of the websites that shares a webserver with my site left CustomErrors="Off" in their web.config when they deployed their site.

How does this affect me? Well, there was a problem in the machine.config on the server. That website exposed the error because it had the customerrors off which basically does a little stacktrace dump on the webpage. In the particular case, it happened to show the bad line from the machine.config. What was the bad line? It set up impersonation for 4 websites on the server, of course mine being one of them. So browsing to that other website, showed anyone going there the logins and passwords for four domains.

So, now this is not a best practice, it is a rule. There are plenty of web.config settings that should not get to production!! Pay attention. Please.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I would just like to point out that the word Indigo is now appearing on Michele Leroux Bustamante's blog. Watch this space for lots of Indigo insights!!!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

okay - there just went the folder with all of my blog images

I am downloading fast and furiously

To whatever a**hole is doing this: Thanks so very much. It would be nice to be able to get some billable work done today. Help my clients. You know, the little things in life.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

This could be an endless post - shout out to so many bloggers I met in person for the first time at TechEd.

First and foremost is Amanda Murphy who I have known virtually for over a year and meeting her was like meeting a younger sister. Amanda runs a user group in St. Johns Newfoundland (practially out in the middle of the ocean). She won one of the INETA Scholarships to TEchEd (after a) the invitation to apply had landed in her junk mail box and b) after I got her to FIND the invite, still almost didn't apply becasue she thought she would never get it.) Ha. Watch this girl - I think she is definitely an up & comer in the .NET community.

Also, I loved meeting Chris Williams & Jason Olson, seeing a bunch of the guys from MAD Code Camp again (like Frank LaVigne and Jeff Schoolcraft). Lorenzo Barbieri seemed a little surprised that I recognized him - the value of a good blog, having your picture on it and a few years of Italian in college (plus some help from Google language tools). I am going to try to find a GURU shirt for myself.

Oh, of course there are hundreds more. You know who you are!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Can someone email me my posts from today - maybe they are still in your aggregator??

There are a bunch missing, but now I think everything is all cleared up on my server and with my blog update.

Thanks!!

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Here is the abstract for the talk Sam is doing tomorrow night at VTdotNET as our first INETA event of 2005.

There have been a lot of arguments in Blogs and elsewhere lately about SOA and two themes seem to emerge from some: SOA is bogus because there is a lot of hype around it and SOA is bogus because it’s nothing new. We will dispose of both of those arguments early in showing that SOA is a real and excellent way to build loosely coupled, distributed systems despite being over hyped beyond belief There are parts that are not new but what is different is clear focus on services as DISTINCT from objects. After looking at what SOA and SO are, we will looking at how to implement services using WSE3 and .NET 2.0 on the Microsoft platform. The culmination of this approach of course is Indigo and now that Indigo is public we will take a deep dive into Indigo. All throughout, we will focus on a practical approach with simple code demos to reinforce the concepts.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Too much comment spam - server problems, etc etc. I am going to do a clean install of the latest dasblog and maybe captcha as well. Ahh, Sundays. I have always gotten gobs of referral spam, but since I don't show referrers, I didn't worry. But now the comments spam is coming on fast and furiously.

So - for me, the hottest coolest new thing I saw at TechEd was the TabletPC Thinkpad by Lenovo. I kept telling Arin Goldberg that I'd be MORE than happy to trade my Toshiba M200 with 1GB for it. Oh well. But now I see Avonelle's got one on the way. Thatta girl!!!

Posted from BLInk!

I just received an email from my awesome webhost, Alentus, saying that they had to move my website to a new server. Although not even in the top 10 of bandwidth there, they said my site was contributing to the heavy load at about 30GB a month! Oh my.

TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

I can't believe that I just found a picture on Kirk Allen Evan's blog documenting what had to be the BEST TechEd session this week.

I was sitting at a cabana table this morning with some of my favorite German and North Carolinian guys, and the topic of transactions came up. I am admittedly pretty light when it comes to distributed transactions, but have had to dig deeper into them as of late, for example in preparation for the MARS webcast which I did with Glen Gordon (who I got to meet in person this week!) and also in yesterday's conversations about DTC. Mentioning this, I suddenly found myself having a 20 minute private training session with Clemens Vasters, Rich Turner and Christian Weyer all teaching me about transaction resource managers. Just me. Three brilliant instructors, one student. 

Clemens walked me through a transaction resource manager that he has written and I was introduced to a whole new flavor of programming model. I have been limited to thinking about transactions only in the scope (ummm, no pun intended) of database transactions. I always feel that I am pretty much representative of the bulk of developers out there, so surely this is not an uncommon misconception.

Kirk posted a bunch of TechEd pictures and as I was looking at them tonight, I  was surprised, but happy, to see that he had captured the moment!

I think that we will soon all have our eyes opened up a little more about leveraging DTC to create transaction resource managers.

Also in the photo are Don Smith and Don Browning at the same table, and Robert Hurlbut (who also knows a thing or two about DTC) at the table behind us.

Posted from BLInk!

Oh, now here's a big shocker! Kate, who I love, admire, respect and trust, both as a professional and as a great human being, has been named RD of the Year by the MSDN Regional Director program. My understanding is that all of the other 120+ RDs around the world have a vote on this.

Here is a fantastic blog post all about Kate and this lovely honor.

And here is a post by Kate which is a great insight to what really makes her tick.

 

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Help promote the TechEd Speaker Auction!

Put this image on your website along with the link to the auction

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TechEd Speakers Charity Auction http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5587400881

Although I have had conversations in the past with Tim, Dr. Neil and Rob about speaking at VTdotNet this year, I have managed to (nearly) lock them in while at TechEd. Yahoo! Now I have the rest of the year covered (with December being our christmas party). I realize that I have got all of our INETA events piled into this half of the year!

                 

06/13/05 : Sam Gentile (INETA event)

07/11/05 : Kathleen Dollard (INETA event)

08/08/05 : Julia Lerman

09/19/05 : Neil Roodyn (97% sure)

10/17/05 : Tim Ewald

11/14/05 : Rob Howard (INETA event)

http://www.AcehAid.org

http://blog.steeleprice.net/archive/2005/06/09/640.aspx

I was very lucky that Steele showed up as well as Michael Kaplan and a pair of folks (one developer, one marketing person) from Mobiforms who have all of their bets on a 3rd party tool they are working on for Avalon developers. I don't think of myself as bleeding edge when I work in Whidbey because I look at people who are doing Indigo, or heck, the people who build (and keep pushing) the edge as bleeding edge. One thing I know is that it is all relative. I have more thoughts about last nights discussion and will write about that after I let them simmer a bit. But as Steele mentions, I think that the common theme was MOTIVATION. What motivates a developer or business to go to future products adn how do you motivate your developers to look ahead.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I will write about what I have learned when I have time to absorb it all but I have seen great presentations by Steve Schwartz (overview of the variety of technologies to pick from for designing connected systems), Michele Leroux Bustamante (awesome look at doing ws-security with wse2 "beyond the wizards"), Mark Fussell (my *must see* .. WSE 3.0) and Tim Ewald (who I have locked in for Oct. 17th at VTdotNET ) Tips & Tricks for implementing Web Services - so great that this is what he will be doing at my user group. I have never seen Tim present before and he is a TOP notch presenter. He has mastered the art of not flying through his content but making a statement and then pausing, letting you spend a moment thinking about what he has just said. I am going to try to be conscious of this when I present.

Although I have had many strings trying to pull me to skip TechEd today and go to Epcot Center ("if you can see only one thing while you are here...."), I will make a point of doing more sessions today.

http://www.AcehAid.org

xTras.Net is one of the most creative vendors of 3rd party developer tools out there and owner Mike Schinkel has come up with another great idea! Xtras is publishing the "How to Select" guides edited (and  sometimes authored) by Mike Gunderloy. I saw the first in the new series which was How to Select PDF Components. I took a look, there a a long list of these to choose from and I could only think of one that I know (off the top of my head). When Mike showed this to me, I just thought what a GREAT idea! People are always looking for this type of advice which is a different spin than reading straight reviews.

So keep your eye out for these!

http://www.AcehAid.org

There is another auction happening right now to benefit Aceh Aid at IDEP (now renamed to Aceh Recovery at IDEP). Twenty three TechEd speakers have put one hour blocks of their time on the auction block. The auction goes until Thursday, June 16th. We raised over $10,000 for this incredible organization in January and many lucky winning bidders got some great advice from some of the top consultants and brains in the industry. So whether you want to spend an hour asking Juval Lowy some tough architecture questions, learn about the future of communication with Don Box, get some of your tough VSTS questions answered by Richard Hundhausen or Joel Semeniuk, you can do that and lend some aid to help the people of Aceh Province Indonesia who still have a loooong way to recovering from the terrible disastrous Dec 26th tsunami (and consequent earthquakes).

HERE IS THE LINK!!

http://www.AcehAid.org

TechEd is many things to many people. During the day and evening, the choices are overwhelming. During each time slot there are 20 standard technical presentations and nearly as many cabana talks. There are dozens of ...

[A DevLife post]

http://www.AcehAid.org

I had someone ask an ADO.NET question last night that I just couldn't answer. It was a little more about distributed transactions which I have little experience with. So I had him type the question into Notepad on my laptop. Twenty minutes later, I saw Pablo Castro and had him type the answer so that I could get it back to Ziga without misinterpretation. Pablo also filled me in so that I understood the question as well as the answer. I thought I would share it here....

Q. What's the performance difference when using a transaction scope vs. assigning transactions to connections & sqlcommands the ado.net 1.1 way?

A. Short answer (there is much more to this topic)

If you're using System.Transactions against a SQL Server 2005 server, then the cost is more or less the same (assuming that you don't bring more than one Sql connection to the scope).

On the other hand, if you're hitting a SQL Server 2000 server, then System.Transactions will be more expensive because we'll "promote" the transaction (into a distributed transaction) even for the very first connection.

Posted from BLInk!

surely this is everywhere on the blogosphere, but I want to be sure to push it to the VTdoNET site!

Paul Flessner announced the official release date for VS 2005 - Nov 7th.

According to Mark Fussell, the program manager for WSE, WSE3.0 will be out somewhere in the 4-5 timeframe after VS2005e is released.

http://www.AcehAid.org