I satyed with Kate Gregory last night in the Airport Hilton where all of the TechEd speakers are staying. Luckily Kate and I are girls who know to where nice p.j.s when we travel! At about 4am what sounded like a really obnoxious alarm clock started very loudly buzzing in our room. It took a few seconds to realize what it was - the alarm. A woman's voice over the speaker said to evacuate the building. So the entire hotel dumped out to the grass outside of the hotel. Luckily nothing terrible happened - some flooding on the 3rd floor. I was really unhappy to experience how long it took to exit the building through the fire stairwell as people were slowly and casually and calmly going down the stairs. The general assumption is one of "oh, it's just an inconvenience, ha ha nothing important" but how can you really know? One positive sign was the calmness as people from each floor entered to the stairwell which indicated that nobody had seen anything upsetting on any of the floors. Luckily we got to sleep in a little late so it was just like a dream.

Surely there will be many blog posts and pictures about this around the teched blogosphere today!

Posted from BLInk!

Microsoft has flat panel screens throughout the conference center with coverage of the World Cup for all of the international folks here. Most of them have 50-100 people planted in front of them throughout the day. I keep thinking of the money these people's bosses have paid for them to come here and learn but instead they are watching the soccer matches. On the other hand, if it's a non-American company, their bosses would probably understand!

Posted from BLInk!

While at the Marriott in Montreal for DevTeach, Kate Gregory blogged about the plethora of pillows that the hotel had made her bed with. I stayed last night at the historic Omni Parker House in Boston and I think that there must be a trend for making a bed with seven pillows!

I'm all ready to leave in the morning. I think my bag contains 1/3 clothes and 2/3 chocolate and vermont maple syrup (no, not for myself!). This is my 7th big MS conference and I have learned that (unless there is some spaghetti sauce accident) I end up wearing the same pants day after day and have even taken to wearing t-shirts that I pick up at the expo. Sure makes packing easy!

I am still in Vermont and missed Pablo's ADO.NET 3.0 talk. Kent Tegels was there though... [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

Geeze -I had my aggregator filtered on TechEd so I could see what was going on and missed the stream of blog posts about Robert making a big move. It does not surprise me, considering all that he wrote surrounding his mother's recent death wrt "not waiting for life to happen". If you want the scoop, I recommend reading Robert's perspective, not everyone else's interpretations. I was hoping that they would be moving east so I could see Maryam more often. You know, like to Vermont! Now I don't even get to see her on my next trip to Seattle. :-( 

Okay, that's just kind of a joke (and a bit of an attention grab!), although I do expect to be surrounded by about 10,000 men at TechEd. But truly the issue is "so much to do, so little time". Here are some of the gazillion things I am hoping to do during my three short days at TechEd this week:  [read more ...]

[A DevLife post]

www.virtualteched.com

Live video, including the keynote, all week!

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

It seems everyone I talked to today was heading to the airport for TechEd!

I'll be heading down Tuesday morning. My husband is laughing heartily at my idea of getting on the road by 6am. We'll see how it goes!

Jonathan Bruce from DataDirect has organized a data access geek meetup with ADO.NET Technical Lead Pablo Castro (who's name I must mention 10 times every time I do an ADO.NET talk!) and Bob Beauchemin on Tuesday afternoon from 4pm to 6pm. There is limited space at this event, so head over to his blog for details!

I've seen a few posts like Jeff, suggesting that you bring an extra bag in your suitcase to bring swag home. Heck TechEd is in my backyard this year and I'm driving. So if I were a swaghound - I would have the ability to bring home a lot of cubic yards of stuff! I'll definitely go trolling a little for my user group,but that will be about it.

Don't Forget: www.acehaid.org

I am looking forward to being able to get my hands on the RTM version of the ASP.NET 2.0 book that Alex Homer & Dave Sussman have coming out TechEd. The previous versions (alpha and beta) were also co-authored by Rob Howard. I have great expectations for this final version, that is written against the final release of ASP.NET 2.0. Developers are fortunate to have so many great ASP.NET 2.0 books at our disposal.

update: here's the inside scoop on the book from Dave who says it's not just a polished up version of the beta book...

Yes you read that right and no I will not be participating.

I just did my first solo MSDN webcast today. Being the worrywart that I am, I was a little nervous. Here's the lowdown ...hopefully useful for other first timers! [read more....]

[A DevLife post]

So I'm flipping through the local weekly, Seven Days, and I did a double take when I thought I saw Bruce Schneier's name in big letters at the top of the page. Here's the article.

Yep it's him and yep he's coming to Vermont. There's an ACLU meeting on Tuesday and he's speaking at it.

When? You ask? On Tuesday, the day I will be in Boston at TechEd. I will be driving past Montpelier at about 7am.

It's not like I pay attention to his speaking schedule, which has this event on it!

Aaaaargh.

 

I have posted my version of the powerpoint (not the pretty MSDN version since I don't have that) and the sample code from today's Intro to WSE 3.0 webcast.

You can find them on my TALKS page. Scroll down to Introduction to.... and you'll see the zip and ppt files.

Thanks to all who attended!

I hear there was a snafu with the survey and MP3 Raffle and that emails will be sent out to attendees on how to get back in the game (within 24 hours, they told me)

Rather than paste miles (271 lines) of angle brackets in here, I am posting the section of my trace files here from today's webcast and have renamed it so you can view it in your browser if you want. Note that in general, these trace files will contain your UNSECURED raw data as well (I have stripped those sections out in mine) so you don't normally want to do this!

I have put comments in the file to point out what is of interest.

Here is the basic story.

Because our policy indicates SecureConversation, WSE will know that before it can make that HelloWorld call, it needs to request a security context token. So you will see not one, but TWO outgoing messages, one right afte the other. THe first is the request for an SCT that WSE deemed necessary (based on the policy). That request sends the usernameToken with the login and password we provided in code. The user is authenticated against the db and the SCT is created and sent back to the cient. Then the client creates the HelloWorld request, but instead of using the username/password for authentcation, it uses the SCT!

I have put comments in the key spots of the file so you can see the differences between the first and second request. I.E. renders them as gray. Don't be afraid to look at this goo because it's a good arrow to have in your problem-solving quiver! I promise you won't have angle-bracket filled nightmares. If you do, I recommend Dr. Ewald's CureAll Tonic for Angle Brackets.

I'm packing up the code and will write another post when it is on the presentations page of website.

[update: see this post for information on the sample code, etc.]

I did an MSDN Webcast today on Introducing WSE 3.0. Since I had an unusually short amount of time to get through all of my demos,I practiced them over and over (even though they were old hat to me ) just to make sure nothing unexpected happen.

On the very last demo, where I created a new Policy that had "SecureConversation" turned on, it threw an error when I ran the client side app. There was not time to deal with the error and since I knew I had done everything correctly, I moved on, highlighting the key take-away of the demo (which was not seeing "Hello World" on a black screen, but what SC is and how easy it is to implement.)

Now I have just gone back to see what wasn't lined up. I ran the demo again so that I could see what the error was and make sure the code was a-ok before I posted it.... and wouldn't you know, it just friggin worked. And I hadn't touched anything yet.

As my grandmother and all of her grandmothers before her would say: Oy Vey!

[update: see this post for information on the sample code, etc. and this post for more info on the SecureConversation demo]

Sergei Serdyuk writes about last night's first Vermont Ruby User Group meeting in Burlington.

As part of the Web Services Webcast Series, I'll be doing an Intro to WSE 3.0 tomorrow morning at 11am.

It will be a 1 hour session on the key features of WSE 3.0 with as many demos as I can cram in!

There's an MP3 raffle for attendees of this series. Check it out!

Here is the whole series. Please don't ask me why the series of web casts on Web Services (WSE, ASMX, and lot of WCF, of course) is called "Windows Vista: Improve your Deployment and Security Strategy", but at least it's under the WCF section, since it's like a WCF starter kit for those who can't wait until WCF is live!

See you tomorrow!