Plip's Weblog

Phil Winstanley - British Microsoft ASP.NET MVP & ASP Insider.

Snow, Reindeer and Atlas

This week I've been in Helsinki (Finland) giving sessions on Atlas.

I delievered two sessions back to back, the first was on Atlas security and I dived into The different types of hackers there are, Cross site scripting, indentity theft and burglary, the second was on Atlas performance where we explore Configuration, Auto Complete, Update Panels, Browser Speed and Postbacks. Soon those Sessions will be up in a recorded format to watch or download at your pleasure.

Everything went very well in the first session for about ... ooh 10 minutes, after which the feed to the projector seemed to cut out and I was left without any projector for about 15 minutes whilst the audio/visual guys sorted the problem out. That left me a little flustered and I lost my way a bit (apologies to all those in the room cringing as I bounced back and forward through the presentation as though I were Michael J. Fox in a Delorian), but i don't think things went too badly. 

What was really cool about the event was the fact it was being held in a Cinema complex. The presentation rooms were the Cinema Screens. Finally I am a movie star.

  

With me at the event was another speaker, a Mr David Sussman, (you know the one who wrote all those great books on ASP and ASP.NET). It was great to spend some time with Dave and share our experiences of ASP.NET and Atlas of late. David delivered not only the keynote in which he explored Atlas and LINQ but two other sessions, one on IE 7 and the other on ASP.NET Providers, the man is a Presentation Machine!

At the event I finally got to meet Finlands most famous export, Teemu Keiski. Teemu is an ASP Insider and Microsoft MVP just like David and I, so we had lots to talk about when we met up which was great. Teemu also treated us to a Finnish delicacy (Burger and fries). Teemu has a review of the WebDay event on his blog.

I was also interviewed (GRILLED) by a Finnish Online publication about Microsoft and Atlas. They have a review (in Finnish) here. I'm reliably informed the same guys gave Scott Guthrie a hard time when he was over too - so at least I'm in good company.

 

My mental image of Helsinki was somewhat different to reality, I was expecting a very different world, the main reasons I was dissapointed were: -

  1. It wasn't snowing.
  2. There were no Reindeer roaming the street.

That was soon fixed though, David Sussman bought me an Ice Cream (which I got allover my face and hands), then we stumbled across this little fella: -

Sorted. We had snow and Reindeer (almost). 

 

Great event, I really enjoyed it and hope the deligates also did.

Posted: Aug 26 2006, 07:31 AM by Plip | with 7 comment(s)
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Comments

ScottGu said:

Fun!

And I remember those two reporter guys well -- they were indeed very, very, very tough! :-)

# August 26, 2006 3:29 AM

Graham said:

Glad to see you survived the NULL plane ride that flew a month early and managed to get past that ferocious looking Reindeer with ice cream on your face. I've heard that Reindeer can turn nasty if they catch a whiff of ice cream. The can apparently detect one part ice cream in a million parts of sea water. I think that was reindeer...

Very impressed that you got a comment from Scott Guthrie. I was intending to try and draw some upper echelon Microsoft love to my own humble musings but as I can't seem to get any trackback action going on I have had to resort to this blatant comment spam...

# August 26, 2006 5:16 AM

Timo said:

It was nice to see and listen to your (and Dave's as well) presentations at the WebDay06. Too bad that tech stuff messed your security presentation a bit but luckily things got sorted out.

Luckily we don't have snow at this time of the year (summer is way too short), you get enough of that during November - March :) And naturally the best place to spot reindeers is to go to Lapland, except that you incidentally spotted a "city reindeer". But those ones are pretty rare here :)

# August 26, 2006 6:10 AM

Harri said:

In addition to all the clichés about Finland already mentioned, we added something to the mix and gave Phil a treat (yeah right) of Finnish "salmiakki" (liquorice).

Hope you didn't choke on it! :)

When you add mämmi http://antimega.textdriven.com/antimega/2005/02/02/nordic-brown  and blood pancakes with lingonberry sauce http://antimega.textdriven.com/antimega/2005/02/08/a-very-english-fat-tuesday , I think we’ve got the full food circle covered!

Harri, the hard-ass reporter who grilled you

# August 26, 2006 7:23 PM

Harri said:

Your Atlas security presentation was interesting. It reminded me of recent podcasts from Scott Hanselman covering the ASP.NET testing tools. You mentioned some of the same tools, but Hanselman had additional ones covered in http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=10

During the infamous blue screen, I asked if you knew of any security testing tools especially those suited for Atlas and Ajax app security testing. I have some personal interests in these, since we are rolling out a new web community site that we’ve built using Rails and ASP.NET (yeah, hybrid and lot’s of Ajax).

Since you didn't have any specific products in mind, I made research and found one from S.P.I. Dynamics, Inc. Probably quit pricey, but didn’t study their offerings closer. I’d really prefer something open source.

(SPI recently gave a widely reported presentation at the Black Hat 2006 conference by demonstrating how easy it’s to be do nasty stuff using just plain ol’ JavaScript!)

Ajax security is a big topic now, and we're trying to cover the subject in future articles. If you have some good pointers to existing ones, let me know.

Now that Microsoft has added tools for both unit testing and database schema management, it’s easy to predict that not-in-distant future there's probably going to be something for web app security testing.

Harri

PS. Let me guess: we're gonna see a product on MSDN Downloads with a title like "Microsoft Visual Studio 2009 Enterprise Edition for White Hat Web Penetration Testing and Security Auditing, August 2008 CTP Pre-Release Edition", with a code name something like "Margarine"?

# August 26, 2006 7:35 PM

Glav said:

Hey Plip,

You were always a star to me mate. Now its just official... ;-)

Thx for mentioning the podcast too Plip. I like the fact you still used the <head> pun in the presentation. Nice work.

# August 27, 2006 12:59 AM

Snow, Reindeer and Atlas - Plip's Weblog | BlogBov said:

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