Joel From Canada

 It seems that Microsoft has released the Smart Client Application Block.  Happiness.

I finally got around to sticking up PowerPoints and demo code from my last set of Webcasts on Writing Secure Code (http://joel.isa-geek.net)

ObjectSpaces – you better start thinking about it.  It seems that I get into conversations about data design patterns every other day hearing things like “we ALWAYS work with objects”, or “we NEVER use datasets” and “We ALWAYS use typed datasets” – now I am expecting to hear “We ALWAYS use ObjectSpaces”.  I suggest that you start mastering objectspaces – their cool and long awaited (even though this is far from new in the industry).  Dino Esposito wrote a good high level overview of ObjectSpaces in Whidbey that you can read here.

My first Microsoft webcast went pretty good.  I decided to ask Mike D to help me answer questions during the presentation.  We thought it would add a nice interactive dimension throughout the presentation – I could focus on the presentation and the demos (one went boom – still don’t know why) – and he could answer the many (wow there were lots) questions submitted by attendees.   I’m going to post the slides and demo files on www.dotnetwired.com in a public document repository (meaning that you won’t need to be a member of the site to gain access to the files).  I’ll add a blog entry when I get that done – which I would expect would be this weekend.

As some of you might already know February 16-20 is Developer Security Webcast Week.   There will be 13 or so web casts on virtually every aspect of security with the developer in mind.  I’m doing two of these web casts:

Just got back from our February (brr) .NET User Group session.  Tonight, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we had a different format – discussion only.  Turned out, the discussion needed to be facilitated quite a bit – but otherwise I think it was good.  The group talked about ASP.NET (which slowly turned into an application architecture – datasets vs. business object – object relational mapping discussion – hey Joel, what’s new in Yukon), Web Services (which quickly fizzled – we all agreed they were happiness – use them), and Security (hah – there is no such thing, only acceptable degrees of security).

 The Winnipeg.NET Users Group is having its next meeting tomorrow night (Feb 11) – but this time, its going to be slightly different.  To date the group would get a presenter in – they would present – people would nod – eat, and leave.  This time there is no presentation – just discussion (with some facilitation I would hope) on pre-chosen topics.