As I mentioned in my last post, I had a lot of fun speaking at Code Camp III: The Madness.
The conference began with a blizzard making it difficult to drive in (as my friend Dave Burke experienced). With the bad weather, there were still 300+ people in attendance!
I spent most of last week trying to get the February CTP 3 bits downloaded and installed into my Virtual PC slice through various starts and restarts of the downloading process. When I arrived home on Friday night, I noticed I had a DVD in the mail -- would have been nice to have earlier. :) Checking my demos on Friday night, I thought I was having problems, and so re-installed VS 2005 on my way in to the conference. When I got to the conference, nothing worked! I tried to install VS 2005 one more time, and even though it said the install failed, everything fired up. Whew!
All the talks went well, but I had an tough time working with the new ASP.NET 2.0 security controls in the Security for ASP.NET 2.0 talk. The controls were fine, but as I walked through setting up a simple login site, I found some odd quirks. One interesting item is that I can develop and debug as a non-administrator now with VS 2005, but there is no easy way to fire up the ASP.NET Configuration tool from the IDE if you are running as non-administrator (no "run-as"). I can fire up an admin browser session to the configurator, but it kept timing out on me. Although I had to go through a few hoops, some people liked seeing that as they have had their own share of struggles getting things to work.
I have placed the slides and code (some sessions don't have code at the moment as I will be adding that later) on my SecureDevelop code site. If you have any problems with the slides or code, please let me know.
I had some great questions and comments in the sessions that have given me some ideas for new talks and/or articles. One big highlight for me was having a few people come up and say they not only appreciated the material but thanked me for taking time out from my weekend to come present the talks. I, for one, enjoy opportunities like this but that remark really made my day!
