TechEd 2006: Day Two

Day Two: A short summary.Windows Vista Firewall (SEC311)A Steve Riley session always means good things. By itself, the firewall in Vista isn't really that interesting. It looks like they've made some good improvements over the XP Firewall, the rules look a lot more flexible, and the UI looks pretty robust. Basically I went because Steve Riley's sessions never dissapoint. I also drew some cool pictures which apparently offer onlookers a portal into my mind.Developing an incident response process (SEC208)This was another Steve Riley session, which centered around developing a response process that should help you and your organisation respond to an attack. It all made good sense, but a lot of it felt like it was pitched towards larger organisations than most of what's in New Zealand. Still, some good concepts, and if I ever end up working for a company that decides it wants to take this sort of stuff seriously then I might be able to use some of the information gleamed from this session. Oh, and I also managed to draw a picture of a corporate executive panicing and pissing his pants which made me laugh.IIS7 TracingHey! IIS7 is cool, it has some great features, and oh.. it's still not here yet. Again a feeling of deja vu, as I'm pretty sure I saw a session on IIS7 stuff last year, although from memory that was debugging instead of tracing. This session seemed more aimed at Administrators rather than Developers. It showcased a lot of the high end tracing options you can set in IIS7, however I can't see myself needing many/any of them in the near future.Developing Data Driven Applications using LINQI wasn't sure what to expect from this session, however it looks really interesting. I should really go off and read more about LINQ before writing too much. LINQ looked very cool. At a simple level, it seemed like they wanted something kinda like DataSets, but without all the downsides. It really does seem like a pretty flexible system that's easy to work with, but I kept waiting to find out about the downsides. The main thing I wrote down (apart from my doodles ****) was "Is this suitable for the enterprise?", because it almost felt like something which sounded very cool, but might end up only being used for small sample applications. Anyway, LINQ sounds like it has some cool potential - being able to use it against DataSets, or SQL, or Objects is very cool, and being able to project anonymous types at runtime has a lot of potential uses - just need to find out what those downsides are. (Oh, Doug pointed out one of the downsides: IT DOESN'T OFFICIALLY EXIST YET. LINQ is still in beta, and there's no go live license available for it yet.)**** My doodling in this session was somewhat uninspired. I drew a cube with "GO AHEAD" written on all visible sides. Americans seem obsessed with the phrase "go ahead", and the presenter of this session was an excellent example. He could use those 2 simple words 3-4 times in a single sentence without noticing it.

 Print | Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 8:33 PM |