James Kovacs' Weblog

Presenting at EDMUG last week was a blast. The audience was great and people asked some fantastic questions. I presented Enterprise Architecture for Mere Mortals: Authentication where I discussed the major authentication mechanisms for enterprise applications – basic, NTLM, and Kerberos – and authentication topologies – trusted subsystem, delegation, constrained delegation, and protocol transition. It felt very strange doing a development presentation and never launching Visual Studio. I believe the audience got the point that, although not straightforward, constrained delegation isn’t that hard to configure and you don’t have to resort to basic authentication when you need to do a multi-server hop. (e.g. Sending credentials from the client to IIS to SQL Server.) Here is the slidedeck. (N.B. You’ll need PowerPoint 2007 to open it. Email me if you would like a version for 2003.)

I had Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities in my back pocket in case I ran out of things to talk about regarding security. As it turns out, lack of material wasn’t a problem. I always seem to arrive over-prepared. :^) If EDMUG wants to invite me back, I’ve got a presentation waiting. Or maybe I’ll present it at the Edmonton Code Camp…

Thanks again to EDMUG for inviting me to speak!

I’ll be heading up to Edmonton at the end of this month to present a double-header on Enterprise Architecture and .NET Tools to the Edmonton .NET User Group. The site says it’s a Level 300 talk. So I better go make my examples more complicated. :^)

Date/time: Thursday, June 29, 2006 starting at 5:30pm
Location: Stanley A. Milner library (7 Sir Winston Churchill Square)

You can sign up on the EDMUG website.

I’ll also be playing Santa Claus (minus the roly poly belly) as I’ll be bringing the Calgary Code Camp prizes that the Edmontonians mopped up on. (Thanks to everyone from Edmonton who came down and attended the Calgary Code Camp!)

The INETA Community Launch Event is coming to Calgary on Wednesday, February 8, 2006 from 11am to 2pm at the Metropolitan Centre! The event is being co-hosted by the Calgary .NET User Group and the Alberta .NET User Group. This 3-hour session will feature two action-packed presentations.

Representing the Calgary .NET User Group, Daniel Carbajal and I will be presenting Building Cutting-Edge Web Solutions with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0.

Jason Wingfield and Greg Lancaster of the AB.NET UG will be presenting Smart Client Application Development & Deployment.

You can sign up here. (After joining the user group, click on Events… CommLaunch… Add Attendee…) Hope to see you at the event!

Last week, I presented another talk on acquiring your MCAD/MCSD for the Calgary .NET User Group. This time around I covered ASP.NET in Tips & Tricks for 70-305/70-315: Developing Web Applications. Thanks to everyone who attended. You can grab the slidedeck from here.

Thanks to everyone for coming out to the Double Header last night. I enjoyed presenting to the Calgary .NET User Group again and look forward to presenting to the group in the future. I have posted Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities. Links to all the tools are included in the presentation. (Some of them were rather long. I don’t know about you, but I just love typing GUIDs into my address bar.) :-S

As for the second presentation, Microsoft Integration Technologies: When to Use What, I’ll have to look into whether I can get permission from Scott Woodgate and/or Microsoft to post it here.

I’ll be presenting a double-header at the Calgary .NET User Group on Wednesday, September 28, 2005 from 6-9pm. It will be hosted at the University of Calgary, ICT Building, room ICT122 (http://www.ucalgary.ca/map/). Pre-registration is required on the User Group website. Hope to see you there!

Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities
The number of .NET development tools available is extensive and can be quite daunting, but there are a few that should be in every developer’s toolbox. James will examine a wide range of freely available tools including “The Holy Trinity” (NUnit, NAnt, and NDoc), source control, continuous integration, static and dynamic code analysis, debugging, and related tools. The talk will include numerous demonstrations as well as discussion about the practical application of these tools to a development project.

Microsoft Integration Technologies: When to Use What
Ever wondered when to use which integration technology? In this session understand the technologies in the Microsoft platform targeted at Integration including: MSMQ, Indigo, SQL Server Service Broker (SSB), Host Integration Server (HIS), BizTalk Server (BTS), SQL Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Replication. Get a handle on the core use-case for each of these technologies, check out hello-world demos, and see it all happen inside Visual Studio .NET 2005. If you want to understand the breadth of technologies and when you should use which – come to this session.

The Alberta .NET User Group is starting a new season and this one is kicking off with a former collegue of mine, Ron Matyjanka, presenting one of my talks, Tools of the Trade – Must-Have .NET Utilities. Pre-registration is required, which you can do on the AB.NET website. If you can’t make Ron’s talk, I’ll be presenting an updated version of Tools of the Trade – Must-Have .NET Utilities at the Calgary .NET User Group in the near future. I’ll post details here when the time and location have been firmed up.

I’ll be presenting a series of talks for Calgary .NET User Group on acquiring your MCAD/MCSD. The series will include test taking strategies, helpful hints, and other useful information you should know about attaining your credentials.

The first in the series will be Tips & Tricks for 70-306/70-316: Developing Windows®-Based Applications.

Date & Time: Wednesday, September 14, 2005, 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM (Registration starts at 4:30pm)
Location: Alberta EUB Building, Training Room-2^nd Floor, 640 5th Avenue SW, Calgary, AB

Pre-registration at the user group website is required.

Thanks to everyone who attended. You can find the slidedeck here and the VB.NET polymorphism demo here.

I gave an invited talk at the GEOIDE Student Network (GSN) today on the use of .NET in scientific computing. Usually the concern around scientific problems is performance-related, though much of the introductory material is appropriate for introducing any group to .NET. For many performance-related tasks, a managed environment can produce code that is just as fast as native code. Some great references on writing fast managed code can be found:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/
  
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/02/22/378335.aspx
  
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/fastmanagedcode.asp

A few days ago I presented a talk to my company, Quadrus Development Inc., entitled Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities. I covered off the major tools that should be in any .NET developer’s toolbox. These include the usual suspects, many of which I noted here, as well as a few fun ones like devMetrics for checking your cyclomatic complexity. Enjoy!

EDIT: You can find an updated version of the presentation here.