Attend (and/or speak) at the Portland Oregon Code Camp event July 23 and 24

A new feature in Whidbey will allow strings to remain encrypted in memory until they are read. Because strings that contain sensitive information are managed by the .net CLR in the same manner as all other strings, sensitive information could potentially be exposed. Read Shawn Farkas .net security blog for details about the potential vulnerabilities of senstivie information being stored in strings and the new feature of Whidbey found in System.Security.SecureString that targets these issues...

The VB.NET / C# wars are a ridiculous waste of time; Still, I found it interesting to note that not one session that I attended during my five days at Tech Ed used VB.NET...

I carefully plotted my strategy for Tech Ed this year... what sessions I wanted to attend at what times. Don Box always makes my list of top speakers and I hardly never miss one of his presentations. Neither the Tech Ed mini-schedule that developers carry around nor the printed “myschedule” include the names of speakers.. I hate that when I have a schedule conflict with multiple sessions I want to see. As a result I almost missed Don's presentation. Apparently some others did too, as...

I happened to sit next to the staff from DotNetNuke at the INETA summit, including Shawn Walker (the benevolent dictator of the DNN source code). Shawn is in Vancouver, B.C and said that South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, WA within his travel sphere and that he would be willing to come talk to our user group! I know that we have many DNN users in our user group that would absolutely love to see Shawn speak -- so I will try to set this up when I get back from Tech Ed

INETA announced a major restructuring of its management at this year's user group leader conference. The changes quite stark, but are deemed as necessary for the next phase of the organization's growth. Essentially almost all of the founding members of the INETA organization will no longer hold corporate offices or be able to vote. I am very pleased to congratulate one of my friends and co-volunteers on the marketing committee for INETA, Sara Faatz (Wintellect) who was elected Vice President of the...

INETA User Group Leaders Summit (Tech Ed 6/5/2005): Ari Bixhorn the Microsoft Directory of Webservices Strategy gave us a presentation this morning on Indigo. Indigo is the communications backbone of Windows Longhorn. It is Ari's vision that webservices will be as exciting as TCP a few years from now, meaning that we use TCP for everything, but we don't have to give much thought to sockets and network stacks when we write software. Webservices (and more specifically, Indigo) will make writing SOA...