DevDays - Chicago, Wrapup
DevDays was definately worth the wait. I had a wonderful time learning about security in web applications as well as a brief intro into SmartClients.
Now for the wrapup...
The opening keynote was geared more towards marketing. It was such a pleasure to see the different applications that are new and revolutionary - which included VS.NET 2003, InfoPath, BizTalk 2004, and WhiteHorse. Well, as you can probably tell theres a bit of sarchasim in that statement, but seeing the integration of InfoPath and BizTalk 2004 was pretty cool. I felt that the speaker (Todd Kimble) hit a lot of "duh" points with VS.NET - this is DevDays for pete's sake, not a marketing blitz - we know what VS.NET is and how to use it!
I then attended the first SmartClient session, where Jon Rauschenberger dissed all web developers - in pure humor of course, so I'm not offended. This was a great session for me, mainly because I didn't exactly know what SmartClients were, so having it explained to me was a great plus. I didn't have enough interest, however, to stick around for the other 3 sessions - I was more interested in the ASP.NET Security going on in the other room.
The next session was led by Todd Kimble again, who did a MUCH better job than the opening key note. It was, obviously, more technically oriented, and basically scared the crap out of everyone in the audience. He all of us how SQL Injection attacks, Cross Site Scripting (XSS), and input tampering can cause major security risks for all web applications. This session actually was the highlight of the day for me, as it opened my eyes to what can actually happen, and what data hackers can obtain...very scary stuff.
The third session was led by Jacob Cynamon. I felt that this session wasn't a bad session, however, it wasn't as breath taking as the last one, so it was hard for me to actually concentrate. The content Jacob showed was very valuable, though I think I may have to review it at a later date to get the full effect.
The last session was led by Nick Lewis, which basically showed Microsofts OpenHack. As he stated in his first few minutes, it was kind of a wrapup of the last few sessions - and it was. The content was great, Nick showed us a TON of code and how to do things, but like the 3rd session - I'm just going to have to delve into the OpenHack source code to get the full effect.
The closing keynote was great! Jon Raushenberger demo'd Whidbey, and this was the first time I actually go to see it in action. Jeff Key and I were just sitting there picking apart the bugs as they popped up, which was fun. There were some irks that I noted during this presentation that I didn't like about Whidbey, but I really need to get in and start playing with it before I express my views openly. That, and it could just be a limitation of the pre-beta release bits too.
So, overall DevDays was great. It was awesome to meetup with Jeff Key (we actually hung out the entire day), Adam Kinney, Erik Porter, my coworker Brian Bussing, and Ryan Rinaldi. It was a great time at the brewery to just sit back, geek it out, and talk .NET/Longhorn/work and much much more.
Update: Thanks to Ryan, his name is now in the listing! I tried finding your website, but I was using .com instead of .net