.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

Next thursday I will be doing the "Best ASP.NET Practices for Shielding Your Site from Hackers":

I just finished my JSP to ASP.NET webcast which is part of the ASP.NET Week. We had an average of 130 people in the room and I think we had fun (what with opening an Eclipse project in a Microsoft webcast and reviewing some of the nice things that JSP 2.0 and servlets 2.4 bring). Now on for the next one...

Tomorrow (Jan 20) I will be doing an MSDN webcast which will discuss ASP.NET from the perspective of a JSP/servlets developer. That is, we will assume a good knowledge of JSP/servlets and then try to show how you can do the things you are used to but in ASP.NET (and hopefully some more ;-).

I got here at 8:15 in the morning and there were a number of people around. The registration process went on smoothly except for a small glitch in the software: my last name is Sánchez, with a tilde in the a and that was too much for the registration software, but after a while the ladies at the desk figured it out and everything went OK. Now I've got my official PDC bag and shirt. The bag was full with the usual CDs and propaganda (but no Whidbey or Longhorn bits until tomorrow, sorry) and a heavy copy of Writing Secure Code 2nd Edition. Perhaps tellingly, the only big line here was at the Starbucks station. Commnet is working just right, there are 40 or 50 people in the room and probably more using wireless outside and now I have an hour or so to make up my mind about whether I shell out the almost $200 extra to get to the pre-conference sessions. Back to you when I have something more useful to report.

G. Andrew Duthie makes a good question about a presentation format: "Do you prefer to have a presenter write the code live, or do you prefer to have the presenter show a pre-written example, and explain how the important parts work?". As he gives us ample opportunity to ask for the "perfect" format, here goes my 2 cents:

Life *is* full of surprises: a few days ago I hardly managed to go to the PDC, then I was appointed to "cover" the data-driven apps panel (which basically means I'll be in charge of passing the microphone), and now the uber-RD Tim Huckaby accepted me as volunteer in the Smart Clients BOF, where I will have to take questions from very real and scary geeks, luckily Tim will be the moderator and he offered to protect this South American soul, so now I'm counting the days but for very different motivations...

I mentioned here that in the very near future we were going to see an ASP to ASP.NET migration tool. Seems like the future is here (at least, the alpha of the future). Too bad there are so many things I have to learn about Whidbey that probably I won't have time to check this tool.

This article is really dedicated to C++ but have some really useful insight on when to use structs instead of classes (in C# for example). Usually, this discussion revolves around where structs and classes are instantiated (the stack and the heap) and performance in general, but here Bjarne defines and exemplifies invariants and in so doing proposes a very nice object-oriented way of choosing one or another. One more design pattern to my bag.