Drewby

Well, if Jeff Julian doesn't get shot by the Highway Sniper, he'll be presenting at our user group next week on Thursday, Feb 26.

I have to tell you, I've been anticipating this for some time. We first talked about it back at the PDC and as the date nears, I think my wife is tired of hearing me talk about it. She's been looking forward to meeting the guy who bought our daughter the Microsoft bib and personally thank him for his contribution to her becoming a geek like her dad.

If you've never met Jeff, he's an all around good guy with an absolute passion for all things XML. His only fault is his habit to offend drunk sales people from MS. ;)

I think I successfully convinced Jeff to stay over Thursday and Friday night. If you are near enough to Columbus, Ohio stop by for the meeting on Thursday night. We'll go out for some eats and drinks after the meeting. We'll also go out on Friday night and you are welcome to join us.

Are you going to DevDays? The focus for DevDays 2004 is on building secure applications. The Web Track wll include topics like Threat Modeling, Countermeasures and the OpenHack reference application.

If you are an attendee or speaker and want to better prepare for the event, there is a great guiide on MSDN called “Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures”. Chapter 2 is on Threats and Counter Measures and Chapter 3 is on Threat Modeling. You can read the paper online or download it here.

Come to DevDays prepared with your best questions! No doubt, if there are two or more people in a room, there will be more than one opinion on how to approach and implement secure applications. There should be some great conversation at DevDays all around the world.

Between this, this, this and this, I have been working my butt off lately. Haven't you? It's a busy time in our industry. Just when the .NET wave is really starting to kick-in with the [growing] list of company's deploying enterprise applications, there is a new wave coming that many on the edge are feeling the pressure to learn and prepare to be next year's experts.

I love this stuff, but we all deserve a break. My brain needs a breather. Got XBox Live? I'll be on this weekend. My gamer tag is “drewby”. I'll probably be blowing of steam in Project Gotham Racing II or Crimon Skies. Get online and look me up. Leave a comment here with some times you'll be online.