I had fun in Montreal! I presented at the GUVSM user group run by Guy Barrette and Eric Cote (who do a very great and fun Johnny Carson/Ed McMahon, Dave Letterman/Paul Schaffer kind of routine although Guy is definitely a straight man). There were 75 people at the meeting! But it was a special meeting. There were two presentations, the first being Mario Cardinal speaking about the Microsoft Application Blocks (in French so I sat in the lobby), my own WSE presentation and MSDN Canada had donated 20 sets of MS Press .NET Certification books to give away to attendees. So it was a great draw.

It was my first time doing this talk and I learned that I actually have two talks built into there, so in the future I will split them up and be sure that I have at least 2 hours of user group time available. The first part of my presentation is something like “everything you wanted to know about the tools of security – keys, encryption, signing, and the 4 tenets: authentication, authroization, integrity and confidentiality, etc. etc. – but nobody ever explained becasue they assumed you knew it and then you were too embarrassed to ask”. So that’s the long title. Anyway, I was so excited about presenting this information that it ended up being most of the talk. I will have to decide how to modify this entire presentation so I can cover a little more mileage with a little less detail at DevConnections and of course one of my demos tanked ugggh – isn’t that the way. However, the talk was really well received because people walked away with a much greater understanding of the foundations of security and I told them that they just MUST do the Hands on Lab that is on the msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/buildling/wse site.

It was a fun group and a fun night.

Since Sylvain Groulx requested that I stay to talk to his group, GUMSNET, on Tuesday, that group paid for a hotel room for me to stay overnight. Oooh I just LOVE the Omni Hotel especially that as a Select Guest you don’t have to check out until 4pm. So I just stayed there all day in my p.j.s working. What a huge luxury. Now if only they had SECURE wireless rather than unsecure…

The GUMSNET group was getting an updated version of my What’s new in the Whidbey Base Class Libraries talk. That just gets more and more fun every time I do it and I seem to do it right after a release and get to add new things into it all of the time. This time, one of the topics I added in was the BackgroundWorkerProcess class. Unfortunately, I had looked it over, looked through the online samples and though wow – very cool, I get what it’s doing, must add this in. However, it is such an interesting class that we all wanted to dig further into it, but I didn’t have enough knowledge of it at the time. So that’s on my todo list for a mod to this presentation.

There were two questions during this talk that I want to follow up on.

One: Do DebuggerVisualizers get used by classes derived from the classes they are targetted for? The answer is YES! (or should I say “Oui!”) Here is an excellent article by Scott Nonnenberg from Microsoft on the topic and a direct quote:

Multiple visualizers can be associated with one type, and a visualizer can be associated with multiple types. A class derived from a class with visualizers associated with it will inherit those associations, but visualizers cannot be associated with interfaces.

Of course, I still want to test this myself…

Two: Does Client-Side Caching persist across sessions? The logical answer is yes, of course, because it’s on the local machine. However I am going to get confirmation in case there is something wrong with my logic.

Merci, GUVSM et GUMSNET, pendant un temps merveilleux à Montreal!

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