This November the developer editions of DevConnections will be in Las Vegas. I haven't been there in years, after spending a LOT of time there in my early adulthood (don't get any ideas...it's on the highway between southern California and the canyon country of southern Utah), so it'll be interesting to see the place now.
I'm doing sessions in the ASP.NET and SQL tracks:
ASP.NET Connections
AGN205: Diagnosing and Healing Sick ASP.NET Sites
ASP.NET setup and deployment is infinitely better than ASP, but that doesn’t mean that everything always goes smoothly or easily. A single Web application consists of myriad settings in your application, ASP.NET, IIS, the server, and the network. Everything needs to be in perfect alignment for things to work well. In this session we’ll look at strategies and tips for smooth Web site development and deployment, including strange error messages from setup problems, deploying to virtual server hosts, avoiding complete reinstalls of .NET or IIS, configuring your site, and troubleshooting sick sites. Come learn how to take the temperature of your site and prescribe the right cure!
APS201: Everything You Need To Know About Secure ASP.NET Applications
Sorting through all of the security threats and myriad options available through the .NET framework, ASP.NET, IIS, and Windows can be a full time chore. But most ASP.NET apps don't need to implement complex security infrastructure; it's all there for you to use and tweak rather than reinvent. But making wise choices requires you to understand some basic security concepts and how .NET exposes them. This session will cover the threats that your ASP.NET apps WILL have to endure, how all of the .NET and server components conspire together to protect your resources, and the most straightforward ways to develop apps that bring it all together. By the end of the day, you'll know how to never again butt heads with security features and will be on the way to much more secure apps.
This security session is a full-day workshop on Thursday, 11 November. I know the title is pretentious, but we're really going to focus on the essentials of what you need to know to build secure Web apps.
SQLConnections
SDB357: What's New in Security for SQL Server 2005?
SQL Server 2005 will be the first major release of SQL Server since Microsoft began its Trustworthy Computing initiative. As a server product and the foundation for business critical applications, SQL Server 2005 will have a whole new security infrastructure that will affect how you develop applications for it and maintain it. This session will look at what's new, what's easier, what's harder, and why you'll need to have a better understanding of these features than ever before.
SDB358: Essentials of XML Query in SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2000 has always supported XML as a data format, but without any equivalent to SQL for querying the data. That will change with SQL Server 2005, which includes the W3C's XML Query language (XQuery). It's a bit like SQL but works vastly different because of the radical difference between relational data and XML's hierarchical structure. This session will cover the essentials of XQuery and how to use XQuery in SQL Server 2005.
SDV322: Is It Relational or Is It XML? You Be the Judge!
ADO.NET is a powerful and flexible data access technology for accessing relational data. No news there. It is also tightly integrated with XML. Nothing new there either. But one of the best parts of the ADO.NET DataSet object is that it provides concurrent, simultaneous views into the data: relational and hierarchical XML. Using the XmlDataDocument object, you can make changes to the relational data that are immediately reflected in the XML view, and vice versa. Why would you want to do that? Because each view of the data has flexible ways of accessing the data, ways too good to pass up. But there are risks, particularly when you make changes and update the database. Come to the session and find out how to use this powerful technique, and use it safely!
SDV430: Preventing a tempdb Nervous Breakdown
tempdb is a great place to put temporary tables for use by stored procedures and client applications. But overuse and abuse can significantly hurt performance, cause resource allocation contention, and generally stress out your server. A hotfix solves part of the problem, but how you design and use work tables can make a big difference. This session will explore these problems, ways around them, and help you keep your tempdb and servers sane.
