Zi’s Blog

What
Chris Seary - The Importance of Application Security
‘Why is application security so important now? Chris will discuss why the onus is on developers to produce secure systems.
We’ll look at what hackers can do with a system improperly secured, and how to protect it.
Many organisations have raised their security baseline over the last few years, and developers need to be aware of this. Chris will guide you through the most common pitfalls of commercially produced applications so you don’t make the same mistakes.’

Oliver Sturm - An overview of WPF - the end of Windows Forms?
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is an important pillar of Microsoft’s new and upcoming development platform. It’s available today as part of .NET 3, but its importance will grow considerably with the release of Visual Studio 2008 very close. Other tools like Expression Blend complete the picture, providing functionality but at the same time adding complexity to the development environment. This session shows what the framework contains and how to use it in your applications, as well as shedding some light on Microsoft’s ideas of software development tomorrow.

Where
TonyBee Hall, 28 Commercial Street, London. E1 6LS 
England, UK

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7247 6943
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7377 5964
E-mail: info@toynbeehall.org.uk

When
25th October 6.30pm -9.30pm (then we go for a drink).

How to sign up:
Please sign up via the site or by mailing meetings@dnug.org.uk IT IS FREEEEEEEEEEEEE.

See ya there.

Click here for details. Let me know if you need a hand editing the page.

Restaurant has been booked for tomorrow night. Venue is Pizza Express Haymarket. Table should be ready for 6.30pm.

Mike Ormond is going to be talking about ASP.NET Ajax and Alan Dean asking if we have got Object-Orientation all wrong.

Still not sure where it is but will update here as soon as I know. Click here to signup.

Please note: venue is different for this one!

Credit Suisse
One Cabot Square
London
E14 4QJ

Transport wise:
You can use the DLR or the tube (Jubilee Line towards
Stratford), Canary Wharf station.
Get off the tube at Jubilee exit to the right. Go up the escalators
and exit the station out the main glass domed exit.
Turn right out of the station. Walk past some clocks/bar/restaurants
Go up some steps, to the road level.
Turn left and follow road under a light rail bridge (DLR) You will
arrive at Cabot Square. Look up and look diagonally across the
park/fountain and see our building.
Ask at the ground floor reception for Leslie Muller and they will
direct you to the right floor.

Blurb:
Go With the Flow - An Introduction to Windows Workflow
Changing business requirements are the bugbear of the application
developer. The Windows Workflow Foundation is a new component of .NET
3.0 designed to ease the pain by providing an easier way of modelling
long-running business processes in code.
The engine provides in-built support for transactions, business rules,
and persistence. Extensions to Visual Studio provide a graphical
environment for modelling workflows. All of this can be incorporated
into your applications to make them more adaptable, reliable and
reduce your development time.
This talk is aimed at existing .NET developers who want to understand
Windows Workflow and have enough knowledge to decide whether it will
be useful in their projects. The talk introduces workflows, the
workflow engine and its design tools, looks at compensation and fault
handling, the rules engine, transactions and communicating with
external services.

Ben Lamb:
Ben Lamb has been writing business applications since the days of
Visual Basic 2.0. During the dot-com era he had a brief foray into web
development helping to write the UK’s first online hotel reservation
system, LeisureHunt, and developed geo-location services for a 3G
mobile phone company. Realising that .NET was his platform of choice
he now writes financial trading systems for investment banks in the
City with occasional diversions into Python, Open Source and other
interesting technologies.

Basically CIFactory is a Factory for creating a CI solution ie it goes away and will setup a standardized solution. In the process it also sets up appropriate build files yada yada yada.  Below is the blurb from the web site.

CI Factory is a canned Continuous Integration(CI) server and installation script. Adherence to a standard development workspace allows for this product to build most any project out of the box. It uses a plugin architecture.

Looks quite good if you are new to the world of Continues Integration. Not sure that it will add that much value at work as we already have something very similar setup. But I am going to give it a try at home.

Another fantastic Geek Dinner. Really good to catch up with the regulars like Jaime and Oliver. But also meet new developers like Bruce who gave Ian Cooper and I a free copy of Phone Alarm! Well worth a look at if you have a Windows Smartphone/Pocket PC device.

PhoneAlarm is a Today screen plugin - giving you total control over your Pocket PC Phone. Never miss an important call, SMS or Email again. Automatically switch profiles and quickly access Inbox, call history and control the state of bluetooth directly from the Today screen. Optimised for one-handed and in-car use.

Thanks again Bruce.

Ian is going to be talking about linq on Wednesday 28th March. He has just come back from the MVP Global Summit in Seattle and has lots to share!

Hope to see you all there! 

About Ian:

‘Ian Cooper has over 15 years of experience delivering Microsoft platform solutions in government, healthcare, and finance. During that time he has worked for the DTi, Reuters, Sungard, Misys and Beazley delivering everything from bespoke enterpise solutions to ’shrink-wrapped’ products to thousands of customers. Ian is a passionate exponent of the benefits of OO and Agile. He is test-infected and contagious. When he is not writing C# code he is also the and founder of the London .NET user group. http://www.dnug.org.uk’‘