Robert Hurlbut's .NET Blog

Another highlight for me at DevTeach this past weekend was finally getting some glimpses of Indigo through some sessions (including a great Internals talk) with Ted Neward and Steve Swartz and talking to Steve separately during the conference. I am looking forward to digging into Indigo more after the conferences are out of the way (one more for me next week at VSLive Boston).

Speaking of Indigo, I noticed there is a COM+ Hotfix for Indigo (for the WinFx Beta 1 RC) [found by way of Andy Milligan, read the full post]

One highlight (among many) of my stay in Montreal for DevTeach was meeting Montreal natives Nicole Calinoiu and her husband Michel Bordeleau for dinner on Monday night. Nicole is a Visual C# MVP (really, should and soon will be a Security Developer MVP) and Michel is a Media Center MVP. Our evening was filled with good food (we went to a great Italian restaurant on Crescent Street) and great conversation about security, development, consulting/work, and life in Montreal.

Regarding security, Nicole is top notch. She has spent the time digging into the upcoming changes with Whidbey, in particular CAS changes. Her writings on her new blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/calinoiu/ (RSS) (you'd be very wise to subscribe!) are excellent as she describes some problems and improvements she has found. She hasn't posted since February, but I hope she does more. You can find her regularly answering questions, though, in the security newsgroups.

What impressed me a great deal is both Michel and Nicole have curious natures and a thirst to figure out the latest hardware and software changes. Like me, they are on nearly every beta program and they really do check EVERYTHING! One topic I spoke on at DevTeach was Managed Stored Procedures in SQL Server 2005 (early at 8:00 am on Sunday!). I mentioned the three CAS Permission Sets an SQLCLR assembly may be loaded with: SAFE, EXTERNAL ACCESS, and UNSAFE. I wish I had talked to Nicole before that talk, because she gave me a cool script to check the internal permissions of each to determine what else has been added to the EXTERNAL ACCESS set in the latest June CTP (you would be surprised!). The best line of the evening was "UNSAFE = Full Trust, or Full Trust = UNSAFE". Whoever came up with the word "UNSAFE" is to be commended because that is exactly what it is to run at "Full Trust".

A truly priceless evening.

This week has been extremely busy with catching up after TechEd, getting the latest SQL Server 2005 June CTP installed on a VPC, playing with the bits, figuring out changes for demos for DevTeach, and actually trying to get some work done to compensate for all these lost billable hours. Whew!

If you are at the conference, I will be speaking on SQL Server 2005 Managed Stored Procedures, SQL Server 2005 Security, and SQL Server 2005 Service Broker. I will be driving up with Sam on early Saturday morning. I am planning on meeting some friends for the first time, plus checking out this great conference everyone has told me about. It should be fun.

I am finally catching up to some work and posts since getting back from TechEd 2005. Day 3 (Wednesday) was mostly about Least Privilege talks and activities for me. I started the day by attending Aaron Margosis' excellent talk on Tips and Tricks to Running Windows with Least Privilege. You can see the webcast here (for limited time, I think). Take a look at other webcasts from TechEd at this link: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/teched2005.mspx

That night, I led a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session on Developing as a non-admin. I was joined by Aaron Margosis and G. Andrew Duthie (who also had a talk on Friday on Developing with Least Privilege). I felt the session went extremely well. There were several people new to the idea of running as non-administrator and hadn't heard of "RunAs" and other tricks. The highlight for me was watching Aaron work through a demo on my laptop he didn't finish in his early morning session. Priceless!

I will put together some of the interesting questions in a later post as I think they deserve their own treatment regarding answers.

I have spent my first couple of days working in the Connected Systems Infrastructure (CSI) track cabana. My "focus" has been on Enterprise Services, .NET Remoting, and System.Transactions (new for 2.0). I haven't seen a lot of questions on these topics -- mostly BizTalk and Host Integration Services -- but it has been fun interacting with those who are curious about upgrading to WSE and Indigo.

What I really enjoy is meeting people that I haven't seen for awhile as well as meeting those I have only "met" through email or IM or reading a book or blog. Because I have been working in the Cabana area, I haven't been to a session yet. Wednesday will be my day to explore, though. I am really looking forward to Aaron Margosis' security talk in the morning.

Some other news of note:
1) Paul Flessner announced a ship date of the week of November 7th for Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2006.
2) SQL Server 2005 June CTP is available at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads. Of course, I got a real CD -- no download for me! :)

One other highlight for me this Tuesday afternoon is talking to those responsible for System.Transactions to learn about some of the untapped possibilities of this new namespace in .NET 2.0. I hope to learn more, play with the bits more (System.Transactions are essential code complete at this point), and start writing (again) on this cool topic.

One of my first published articles came out a few days ago in the June, 2005 issue of .NET Developers Journal. This is a security focused issue with Patrick Hynds as the guest editor and some great articles by Duane Laflotte and others. I am trying to find a copy, but these seem to be had to locate, unfortunately.

I arrived Sunday noon. It was a little early for check-in to my hotel (not one of the standard TechEd hotels, unfortunately), so the rooms weren't ready. I headed over to registration and found the TechEd store. I made a great find:

The Rational Guide to SQL Server 2005 Service Broker Beta Preview by Roger Wolter (another great little book out of the Rational Guides series). This book isn't available generally yet, so I am glad I picked it up. I showed this to Kirk Allen Evans (whom I finally got to meet) and he agreed this looks to be a great little resource from the master himself (Roger is the Program Manager at Microsoft for SQL Server 2005 Service Broker).

This is very timely as I put finishing touches on my talk on this topic for DevTeach!