Category Archives: Developer Events

Glasgow – Security in Windows Vista – Stephen Lamb – 03/04/2007

Event Overview
In this session, we will discuss many of the innovative design philosophies and development strategies involved in making Windows Vista the most secure Windows operating system to date. One way that this security has been achieved is through service hardening. This means that most services run with low privilege to minimize resource access. Vista introduces several user-level security features within the Windows interface as well as additional enhancements to Internet Explorer including anti-spyware and anti-phishing capabilities. The Windows Firewall has also undergone significant improvements, including enhanced UI functionality, inbound and outbound filtering, filtering by application, and full support for IPv6. We’ll also talk about some of the other security enhancements available in Windows Vista, such as BitLocker, data protection, and improved smartcard support.

When
03 April 2007 09:45 – 12:30
Welcome Time: 09:00

Where
Strathclyde University
Collins Building
22 Richmond Street Glasgow G1 1XQ
United Kingdom

Sign-up and further information can be found here:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032327539&Culture=en-GB

A similar event is being held in Edinburgh on the 06 March 2007 in the evening, more details here.

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BCS Edinburgh: Agile Washes Whiter – 28/02/2007

Agile Washes Whiter
Wednesday 28th February 2007, 6:30 pm
Speaker: Brian Swan, Exoftware
Venue: The Royal Scots Club Hepburn Suite, 30 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh
EH3 6QE

“Agile” is quickly becoming the hot buzz-phrase in many organisations but Agile is simply an umbrella term for a number of specific development methods including; eXtreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Feature Driven Development, DSDM and Crystal. What does it mean to “Be Agile”?

This talk will compare a number of the Agile methods and identify some common strategies and pitfalls when adopting an Agile method.

Booking required – please register here: www.exoftware.com/events/47

More details: http://www.edinburgh.bcs.org/events/070228.htm

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NxtGenUG – Fest07 – 23/05/2007

I am pleased to see that the chaps over at the NxtGenUG are having their first developer festival.

It’s early days, but the speaker line-up promises to be super (you should expect nothing less of the chaps at NxtGenUG!) The session abstracts are taking shape too!

Here’s what the chaps have to say:

The NxtGenUG boys are pleased to announce their very first One-Day Event. We’re not calling it a conference, as we want it to be more than that! We want it to be a day to remember, and another annual highlight for the UK Developer Community.

It’s called NxtGenUG Fest 07 and the initial details are at http://www.nxtgenug.net/fest07. The event will take place at Microsoft UK Headquarters at Thames Valley Park (TVP) on Wednesday 23rd May 2007 and starts at 0900. Food will be provided and we want everybody to go home with a decent amount of quality ‘swag’.

The day has a theme: “Into the future …”. We start the day looking at current technologies such as Vista, then we move into the ‘Orcas’ time-frame, then to 12 months hence or so, probably taking a look at dynamic languages and then really moving out into ‘who knows’ with a session from Microsoft Research. There will be a keynote, with an appearance from UK DPE manager Kevin McDaniel and words from the NxtGenUG crew and finally the day will finish with a new ‘Game Show’ style session courtesy of NxtGenUG featuring an awful lot of ‘swag’!

We’re absolutely chuffed to bits to announce that the ‘headline’ speaker is top TechEd speaker Rafal Lukawiecki and we will also be joined by Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty (perhaps) of the UK DPE and also by Lorna Brown from Microsoft Research. We have one more speaker to announce too, which we hope to do next week.

At lunchtime there will be ‘Grok’ talks presented by NxtGenUG members, on a variety of subjects to be announced.

This event is FREE to all fully paid-up NxtGenUG members and a mere £54.99 for non-members until 1 March 2007, check out the URL for more details. Numbers are strictly limited (we know … everybody says that … but we really mean it this time – 230 tops!) so register early is our advice!

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Scottish Developers – Web Security Conference Day for Windows Developers – 12/04/2007

Scottish Developers are pleased to announce a full-day security-oriented event to be held in Edinburgh on the 12th of April 2007

You’ve taken the courses, you’ve scoured the Internet, you’ve attended many presentations, but alas, you still have many unanswered questions about website security.

Scottish Developers have secured the support of two consultants from Charteris plc, a respected IT and Managemant Consultancy and Microsoft Gold Partner. Barry Dorrans and Chris Seary are security specialists who regularly speak on subjects relating to the securing of web applications.

Come along on the 12th April for a full day of presentations and demonstrations surrounding the real world implications of the most common .NET web techologies: learn about the best practices, issues, gotchas, etc.

Bring along your questions and problems to gain assistance in finding solutions.

AGENDA
08:45 Registration
09:00 Hacking websites for fun and profit
10:30 Break
11:00 Securing applications and communications in ASP.NET
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Code Access Security – in-depth explanation and design pattern for web applications
15:00 Break
15:15 Securing Web Services with WS-*
16:45 Break
17:00 Managing Identity using Windows Cardspace
18:30 Close

– These are rough timings. Some session may end earlier or run later. We aim to shape the day around people’s need, not a time schedule!

Hacking websites for fun and profit
Presented by Barry Dorrans

How safe are your web sites?
Do you know what cross site scripting is?
SQL injection attacks?
Search engine leaks?

Learn how to check your sites for nasties by seeing how it’s done against badly written code and what you can do to secure your sites.

Securing applications and communications in ASP.NET
Presented by Barry Dorrans

This session aims to provide you with recipes to secure your asp.net application architecture, be they internet, extranet or intranet exposed. Covering authentication and authorisation strategies, identity management, securing communications, secrets, viewstate and more the session will discuss common best practices for secure architecture of ASP.NET applications.

Code Access Security – in-depth explanation and design pattern for web applications
Presented by Chris Seary

Chris has implemented CAS in several secure enterprise scale web applications. This talk will explain how CAS works, and also give details of a design pattern for implementing CAS in web applications.

We start by showing a web site being hacked, and then alter the application to stop the hacker while preserving the full functionality of the web site. We also look at OneClick and how it uses Partial Trust.

Securing Web Services with WS-*
Presented by Chris Seary

Why use WS-Security – surely IPSEc and SSL will secure our site?
Actually, WS-* specifications provide functionality that network protocols do not.

We look at what WS-Security can add to web service security, and go through a good deal of sample code (which will be available to download).

This presentation covers both WSE and WCF. We also look into WS-Federation, and how it is to authenticate users from different domains.

Managing Identity using Windows Cardspace
Presented by Barry Dorrans

Windows CardSpace is a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website.

This talk will cover the identity metasystem, how CardSpace works and how you can use within it ASP.NET.

BIOGRAPHIES
Barry Dorrans has spent 15 years cutting code, starting with mainframes, through DOS, Visual C and MFC before finally ending up on the .NET platform. His experience has ranged from banking systems to Europe’s largest streaming network. He now mentors developers through .NET migrations and Expert Witness services with Charteris plc (http://www.charteris.com).

Chris Seary has been awarded the Most Valued Professional (MVP) award by Microsoft for his contributions to the field of application security. He has been securing large scale applications for several years, including the Australian Taxation Office’s mid-range systems, which make up the world’s largest .Net application. He regularly speaks on security, and has had articles published in journals and on MSDN.

DATE
Thursday 12th April 2007, 9:00am – 6:30pm.

Registration begins at 8:45am.

VENUE
Microsoft Edinburgh,
127 George Street,
Edinburgh
EH2 4JN

LUNCH
Approximately one hour will be set for lunch and a place can be pre-booked at a local restaurant.

Please let us know if you have any special dietary requirements.

Lunch is NOT included in the price for this event.

REGISTRATION
Please send an email to john@scottishdevelopers.com indicating you’d like to register. We’ll then complete the registration and book you a place.

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BarCamp Scotland

barcampscotland.gif

I’m pleased to see that the BarCamp initiative has reached Scotland!

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Saturday 3 March 2007, 2pm-6pm (flexible), APPLETON TOWER – Concourse, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Further information can be found here:
http://barcamp.org/BarCampScotland

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DDD5 – DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 5 – The Date

We are pleased to announce the date for the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! event.

The planned date is: 30th of June 2007

More details to follow, but if you’d like to speak at DDD5, now is the time to start thinking about your session(s) and/or GrokTalks – we’re hoping to open the Call For Speakers on the 24th of March.

Watch this feed (other feeds are available!) for more important date announcements!

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Vista Developer Launch – webcast – live now!

If you couldn’t make it to Reading for the launch itself, it is being streamed live here:

http://gaia.world-television.com/ms/20070119/

More information here:

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx

Line up for today, day 1, track 1:

1045 – 1200 Extending the Microsoft Office User Interface – Mike Taulty
1245 – 1345 Microsoft Office and XML – Making the Data Work for You – Mark Johnston
1400 – 1500 Beyond Office: Extending Your Reach with Office Server – Mike Ormond
1515 – 1615 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server – Business Intelligence and Content Management Solutions – Martin Parry
1630 – 1730 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server – New Collaboration Features and Workflow – Daniel Moth

Track 2:

1045 – 1200 Clarity – Presentation Advances in the .NET Framework Version 3.0 – Mark Johnston
1245 – 1345 Clarity – Presentation Advances in Windows Vista – Daniel Moth
1400 – 1500 Confidence – Security and Reliability with Windows Vista – Martin Parry
1515 – 1615 Connectivity – Windows Vista for Syndication and Workflow – Mike Ormond
1630 – 1730 Connectivity – Distributed Applications on Windows Vista – Mike Taulty

On-demand downloadable versions of the sessions can be found here.

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