Monthly Archives: September 2006

Great FAQ on managing X509 Certs

WSE

On Thursday evening I gave a talk on WS Security Fundamentals in Dayton Ohio. One of the resources I point to is the PAG Guide on Securing Web Services. On the way home the next day, while sitting on the runway in PHL for 2 hours before taking off (uggh), I was reading the latest ASPNET Pro and Michele Leroux Bustamante’s Under the Hood column was all about X509 cert management. It’s great advice and I highly recommend it. It’s the October 2006 issue which does not have all of its articles online.

Many developers who are starting up with programming message level security (eg with WSE or WCF) definitely have a learning curve when it comes to having to grok all of these bits and pieces of security tools that we have to work with – encryption, hashing, signing, certificates. I don’t know how many times I have seen the question “where do I get a certificate” in the wse newsgroups. Heck, I had the same question myself once. And it was a lot of work to wrap my head around all of this crypto stuff.

So…. if you get ASPNET Pro or you can grab a copy at your local user group, check it out.

I’m going to send this to the sysadmin that works with one of my clients. I spent three months trying to explain to him why I needed a server certificate that was not going to be used for SSL. Aargh. Message level security seems to be a bit of an oxymoron to IT Pros.

More about DevReach Bulgaria

Community Cheerleading

(from their press release)

DevReach 2006 debuts in Bulgaria

 

The conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

 

SOFIA, Bulgaria – September 04, 2006 – National Academy for Software Development – a private education center, specializing in professional training of software engineers, and Telerik Corporation – a leading vendor of UI and data components for ASP.NET, announced today the DevReach conference to be hosted in Bulgaria with the sponsorship of Microsoft Corporation.

 

DevReach conference is the first of its kind to be held on the Balkans, focused on the latest trends in building software applications with Microsoft development tools.

 

Over two days, more than 500 attendees will meet 12 world famous lecturers, engaged all year round in such events as TechEd, VSLive!, Microsoft DevDays showcasing their latest knowledge in creating more reliable, scalable and secure solutions using Microsoft technologies in more than 20 technical sessions.

 

DevReach will be held at the International Exhibition Center on October 9-10 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference is hosted by National Academy for Software Development and sponsored by Telerik Corporation and Microsoft Corporation.

 

DevReach is the premier development event on the Balkans, featuring in-depth exposure to the latest Microsoft development technologies and a chance to interact with other members of the developer community.

 

Teodor Milev, managing director of Microsoft Bulgaria is scheduled to deliver a keynote presentation unveiling the latest Microsoft platform innovations for developers.

 

Keynote highlights also some industry-recognized innovators, including Plamen Vatchkov, chairman of the State Agency of Information Technologies and Communications, Nikolay Vassilev, minister of Public Administration and Administrative Reform, and others.

 

Developers at DevReach can benefit from sessions arranged in 3 parallel tracks that present vital information on important topics such as best techniques for accessing data with SQL Server and ADO.NET, writing high performance and extensible ASP.NET sites, writing secure and efficient .NET applications in integration with 2007 Office System and SharePoint.

 

As a part of the event attendees have the unique chance to participate in technology “Question & Answer” forums and network with more than 10 world known gurus in software development with Microsoft tools.

 

The target of the event is to become a place for passionate Microsoft developers from Eastern Europe to get in touch with the latest trends and to become a significant part of the global community.

Three Ohio user groups this week

Presentations

After I warm up by speaking at my local user group tonight (Vermont.NET) about Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0, I am taking the proverbial show on the road and will be presenting this same session in Cleveland tomorrow night (9/12), then my session called “5 Supposedly Scary things about .NET” in Findlay on Wednesday (9/13) and I wrap up in Dayton on Thursday night (9/14) doing a talk that explains some of the security fundamentals that anyone getting ready to do any flavor of Web Services Security (WSE, WCF (aka Indigo), or even non-Microsoft platforms) should have under their belt. The last talk is all concept (eg: what the heck is a digital certificate, what is encryption, what is signing) and no code, but pretty powerful, especially for people who don’t know a lot about security and are daunted by all of these mysterious crypto tools.

I don’t think I have ever been to Ohio – except for driving through it on a road trip to Colorado nearly 10 years ago.

You can see my full schedule here.

You can see the schedule of all INETA sponsored events here.

Vermont.NET tonight – Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0

dotNET

I’ll be doing a talk on ASP.NET 2.0’s Asynchronous features (async pages, async tasks and more) tonight at my home town user group (VTdotNET).

Huge thanks to SyncFusion for sponsoring this entire meeting. Not only are they covering the pizza & soda, but they have given us a license to Essential Studio to raffle off. It’s a $1300 product (okay, that’s the retail price). And there will be even another raffle for an individual license of any one of their components.

Vermont IT Jobs: Lots of Developer, DBA, SysAdmin and related jobs for State of Vermont

Jobs

No direct link so here’s how I found these:

Go to the State’s public recruitment site: http://erecruit.per.state.vt.us/index.html

Select View Job Postings/Apply for  a Job

Search with the cateogyr “Info Technology & Statistics” selected.

There are over 20 job listings here such as Systems Developer, Network Admin, DBA.

There are a few Data Analyst jobs in there as well.