Today I was privileged in being invited to sit in on a round-table discussion with S. Somasegar (Soma), the Corporate Vice-President of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Soma and a few members of the developer tools teams are meeting with local “developer influentials” to discuss the current tools as well as Whidbey. Nothing was NDA so I’m assuming I can fill everyone in. Here are a few notes that I gathered from the discussion (sorry I should have been writing more).
As everyone well knows Whidbey and Yukon are very tightly coupled together. A slip in schedule effects the shipping date for the other. (nothing new here)
The newly named Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview is up and available for all MSDN subscribers. This is a 2.67GB file and will take you 4+ hours on a T1 to download (according to MSDN’s estimates). You will either need a DVD burner or a utility to mount .IMG files (if one exists). This is the same bits that Microsoft is handing out at VSLive! today and will be handing out at future developer events as well. The word is that MS plans to do these kinds of releases every 6-8 weeks which will keep everyone on their toes. What you must understand is that these are not beta releases; they’re “technology previews”. This means that some features may work in one drop but maybe completely non-functional in the next. Use at your own risk. I HIGHLY recommend getting a copy of Virutal PC for your VS2005 installs. I think this is very cool on Microsoft’s part and hope they continue to provide these to the developer community.
There is still quite of bit of information that MS is holding back on regarding the new feature sets. Some of this information will be disclosed at TechEd in San Diego and everything (regarding features) will be disclosed after TechEd/Amsterdam. Be on the lookout for a number of enhancements to refactoring.
Part of the discussion revolved around how Microsoft can get their products (including the previews) in the hands of developers without requiring the developers to keep installing the drops. Look for the possibility of MS using the ‘Try It’ concept or handing out Virtual PC images of the drops.
Our friendly neighborhood Microsoft Developer Community Champion, Jacob Cynamon, will be presenting the next regional MSDN Seminar Series event for Chicago on Thursday, March 25th. The March/April content looks to be covering the aspects of developing secure applications. So if you weren't able to attend DevDays, I would highly recommend attending an MSDN event in your neighborhood.
Session #1: Writing Secure Code – Threat Defense
In this session for experienced developers, you will learn established best practices for applying security principles throughout the development process. You will learn effective strategies for defending common security threats such as buffer overruns, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and denial of service attacks.
Session #2: Implementing Application Security by Using the .NET Framework
In this session for experienced developers, you will learn how to implement additional security features to secure applications that are built on the .NET Framework. You will learn how security features are integrated into the .NET Framework. You will learn how to use both code access security and role-based security to limit vulnerabilities. You will also learn how to use the cryptographic provider support in the .NET Framework to encrypt and sign data. Additionally, you will learn how to secure Web applications and Web services that are built by using ASP. NET. Finally, you will learn a few tips for writing secure code with the .NET Framework
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