Here's the presentation I delivered at the Auckland Code Camp 2010. It covers 10 things that I found when surveying attendees websites :)

If you're in Auckland this Sunday, come along and check out the latest Microsoft technologies from MS Communities.

It's happening Sunday 29 August from 930am till 530PM at the University of Auckland Business School. This is a free event so please Register and attend

The MS Communities website is at http://mscommunities.net.nz/summit/ with the days agenda

We got some great feedback from attendees at this year's Code Camp in Auckland. I thought I'd share some stats from the survey sent to attendees.

We counted 300 people there at one time, so we estimate somewhere between 300 and 350 people came along for sessions during the day. Note that approximately half of the attendees responded to the survey that these figures were drawn from.

We had three streams: Development, SQL and Security.

Attendance was roughly:

• Development: 68%
• SQL: 19%
• Security 13%

Although, people could switch between streams as they wished.

Did you also go to TechEd?

• Yes: 30%
• No: 70%

How did you find out about Code Camp?

• dot.net.nz mailing list: 23%
• Co-worker: 35%
• MSDN Flash Email: 22%
• via a blog: 5%

Session feedback:

• 94% of session feedback was in the range 'satisfied' to 'very satisfied'
• 40% of feedback was 'very satisfied'

Regions:

• 85% from Auckland
• 4% each from Wellington and Bay of Plenty
• 3% each from Waikato and Canterbury

User groups:

• 51% of people attend one or more of their local user groups
• To the remainder: come along and join us!

The presenter with the most feedback on his sessions was the AWESOME Ivan Towlson.

We got lots of great general comments, here are a few:

Great work guys! Thoroughly enjoyed.

Really enjoyed the day - thanks guys!

Thanks for the opportunity for those of us who could not attend TechEd

I am a sole operator / consultant with very limited budget, so "free" events are really appreciated.  I am very happy to dedicate my time to attendance at events that are run as well as this was.  Thanks again.

We appreciate international visitors giving up their mornings to our benefit

I really enjoyed every session and thought that each one had a valuable piece of information to take away - well done!

Thanks everyone for your feedback (good and bad constructive), we'll use it all to help make the next community Code Camp even better!

To find out about future Code Camps, and user group events in your area, please visit the dot.net.nz website and sign up to a mailing list.

Kirk

Code Camp is less than two weeks away!

If you want to catch some free sessions on the state-of-the-art in .NET development, SQL Server and developer security then sign up for Code Camp Auckland 2009 now.

Code Camps are non-profit, and organised by members of the local developer community. This year the Auckland Code Camp is the day before TechEd (Sunday 13 September), so we've managed to nab a few great speakers on their day off to present to us.

It's the biggest Code Camp ever - over 14 hours of sessions across 3 streams from 10am till 5pm:

Development...

• What's Happening in .NET Languages and Why Should You Care?
• .NET on the iPhone and Beyond
• Behaviour Driven Development
• Domain Specific Languages
• C# 4.0 new features
• Silverlight with Prism
• Becoming Certified
• Lightning Talks
• and more!

The latest and greatest in development topics, by the people that know!

SQL Server?

• SQL Server Virtualisation Best Practices and Recommendations
• SQL Server Analysis Services and Gemini
• Query Optimization and Query Tuning
• Understanding SQL Server Indexing
• SQL Server Maintenance

Training and guidance from the best SQL trainers in the industry!

Security!

• Secure Development Lifecycle and Threat Modelling workshop
• Secure Coding Practices

We are lucky to have Michael Howard, author of Writing Secure Code and 24 Deadly Sins of Software Security giving a free workshop for developers, architects and team leads on Threat Modelling and the Secure Development Lifecycle. This will be followed by a session on how to write secure .NET code.

Auckland has never seen such an awesome free event!

Presenters that are offering their time include Greg Low, Nicholas Dritsas and Auckland's Alex Henderson of Architecture Chat fame.

To cover the costs of the event, we have the help of our generous sponsors: Microsoft, Datacom, Intergen, INETA and Xero.

All that's left for you to do is to visit the website for more details, and sign up now!

See you there on Sunday 13 September,

Kirk

Well, what did I learn while at Code Camp last weekend.?

• Wellington .NET dev community is passionate and quite diverse
• Objective C is more smalltalk-ish than I realised from previous snippets I had seen
• Xcode IDE is less 'integrated' than Visual Studio
• I now know more about CRM and other Microsoft solutions
• A panel discussion (Usability or Security) can be fun when the audience participates
• How to make my code slightly more maintainable
• Code contracts gel with me more than Spec# did. and I like them
• F# continues to be awesome and yet awe-inspiring
• Sync framework looks like a good solution for occasionally connected apps, with a good set of functionality out of the box
• And I demoed a beta IDE in a beta VM on a beta OS (VS2010 in Windows Virtual XP on Windows 7)

Sponsors are awesome!

• Whitireia Community Polytechnic (in particular, the Bachelor of Information Technology staff) were very accommodating hosts
• Mindscape surprised by offering prizes of 2 LightSpeed licenses and one "bundle of everything"
• Microsoft NZ sent through prizes, and the Microsoft MVP Programme sponsored some of the costs
• INETA APAC, the International .NET Association also sponsored some of the costs
• Xero also sponsored towards the costs
• DTS provided internet for the weekend

Go Go Gadget. Karting!

I had fun at the go-karts. The winners of the team event were Simon and Bert:

I'm looking forward to the Code Camp this weekend. We've got an interesting range of talks lined up over the two days, and I'll be doing a short talk on what's coming in Visual Studio 2010.

As well as organising the finances and food, I've organised the social event for Saturday night. It's going to be fun!

Code Camp Social Event

6:30pm, Sat 13 June @ North City Indoor Raceway 3 Raiha St, Porirua http://bit.ly/g6gLf

Food at 7pm, racing shortly after. Finish by 9pm.

A family-friendly go-kart race, with geek-against-geek action.

The karting is at the North City Indoor Raceway: http://www.ubd-online.co.nz/indoorkarting/ (see "The Races")

There will be a team race where each team will relay through each driver 3 times, giving 30 laps of racing per person. Everything is computer-timed to find out which team wins, and spectators are welcome to watch.

The food will be BBQ/Salad/Chips, and you can BYO drinks (I'll hopefully have some money left to bring a little along).

Karting plus food: $40
Food only: $10

Spouses and older kids are welcome to kart at the above prices, or come along just for food and cheer your team on!

Many thanks to our sponsors: Whitireia, Xero, Microsoft MVP, INETA, DTS

Hi,

Many thanks to those who came along to our PDC Fireworks session last night. I hope you had an interesting time hearing about what's coming on the horizon, and that your families enjoyed meeting your geek friends!
A huge thank you to our speakers who presented on such a wide range of topics in a limited time. If you want to find out more or watch any sessions from the PDC, you could visit the Channel 9 PDC site, or visit the blogs of the presenters:

• Chris Auld
• James Newton-King
• James Hippolite
• Mark Orange
• Chan Kulathilake
• Owen Evans
• Kirk Jackson

Also, a big thanks to those who helped set up and tidy up the room. Great job!

The .NET user group meets once or twice monthly, usually on the first and third Wednesday of the month. If you'd like to go on my mailing list for upcoming user group presentations, please email me.

If you're interested in the Wellington Sharepoint User Group, or the Wellington SQL User Group, make sure you follow the links to sign up to them.

Upcoming Sessions:

Wed 19 Nov, 6pm - Microsoft .NET Services with Chaks Chandran [.NET User Group]

Microsoft .Net Services is a part of the recently announced Microsoft Azure Platform. What does Microsoft .Net Services provide ?

Microsoft .Net Services consists of three main components:

1. Service Bus
2. Access Control
3. Workflow Services

They provide a hosting platform where you can develop connected, peer to peer applications that can speak to each other without considering the other complexities such as firewall rules and NAT etc,.

Venue: Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington

Please RSVP to kirkj@paradise.net.nz

Thurs 13 Nov, 1:10-5pm - MSDN Unplugged [Microsoft]

Sat 6 & Sun 7 Dec - SQL Pass Community Connection [NZ User Groups]

Wed 3 Dec, 6pm - Overcoming your web insecurity [.NET User Group]

In this hour-long session, I'll be introducing you to some of the threats your ASP.NET website will face, and give you ideas on how to protect your users, company and yourself. This applies to public facing and internal (intranet) applications.

RSVP details will be sent out to the announcement list closer to the date.

Thanks for reading this far!

Kirk

I got a chance to watch a few great presentations at Code Camp yesterday:

Ivan Towlson - Thinking in WPF :

I've seen Ivan's talk already at the Auckland Code Camp, but I got a few new nuggets of WPF goodness out of it. It was fun watching people get up on the stage and act out the named parts pattern :)

John Rusk - Linq to SQL:

This was a really interesting dive into the good and bad of LINQ to SQL, and some of the stuff John and his co-workers have had to do to work around and extend it, including checking that the model matches the database, in memory save points and model inspection.

It sounds like they've got some really cool code that can be re-used by others -- now we just need to convince them to release it!

Jeremy Straub - IIS 7 Extensibility:

Jeremy gave a short talk about how easy it is to automate IIS administrative tasks, such as creating websites and setting properties, and showed how to do so from within C# and PowerShell. It's really nice how much you can do programmatically against IIS7.

Baroon Anand - Team Foundation Server:

Baroon's talk introduced TFS, and went through some of Intergen's customisation and uses of TFS within their business process and projects. A good overview with some interesting nuggets on running projects through TFS.

Lightning Talks:

I was being the dastardly timekeeper for the lightning talks which was a fun task. There were about 7 lightning talks @ 5 minutes each, on a variety of topics from C# to paper prototyping, solving real-world problems and PDC / Azure announcements. Well done to everyone who presented, there's at least an hour of content from each of that I'd love to hear!

Matt Smith - Productive Sharepoint Development:

Matt is a great presenter, I really enjoyed his talk. It was similar to his TechEd talk (which I didn't go to), so the above link will help you out if you want some tips on how to be a productive developer using Sharepoint (summary: ask your boss for a fast PC, and make your build/deploy as quick as possible).

A bunch of cool tools and tips punctuated by good humour :)

Kirk Jackson - Overcoming your web insecurity:

I can't really comment much on this talk, except to say that there's more stuff in the slides if you're interested :)

David Bales - Scrum Game:

This was a lot of fun. Rather than teaching Scrum via PowerPoint, David had us organised into groups trying to complete tasks by running a series of sprints. I think everyone in the room had a better understanding of the Scrum process and a little idea about the challenges you come across by the end of it.

Clarus is running a Scrum course in December.

Of course, there were other presentations through the day (there were two streams), so I didn't get along to all of the great Code Camp presentations. Well done to all of the speakers for great content, and to the organisers for a really interesting day!

Kirk

I had a fun time presenting my talk at the Christchurch Code Camp yesterday. I only fell off the stage once!

A collection of urls:

• Subscribe to my blog: http://pageofwords.com
• The Classifieds web site starter kit
• The Microsoft Anti-XSS Library (use instead of HttpUtility.Encode)
• Which ASP.NET Controls Automatically Encode?
• Clickjacking video
• Framebusting:
  http://pageofwords.com/blog/2008/10/06/FrameBustingInJavascript.aspx
• Security Runtime Engine (coming, will help with ASP.NET controls)
• OWASP – The Open Web Application Security Project – http://www.owasp.org

Here's the sanitised version of my slides:

I've arrived at the Christchurch Code Camp. Currently Ivan is presenting his kick-ass WPF talk "Thinking in WPF".

Today I'm doing a presentation on ASP.NET security, covering the basic threats and giving some of the quick wins that you can do to protect your application and users. I'll post the code up here shortly.

Looking forward to an information-packed day!

Kirk

I enjoyed reading this book. Christopher Fairbairn, organiser of the Christchurch .NET User Group recommended it to me as containing a bunch of useful tips for running a user group, and I have to agree with him.

The author is Dr. Greg Low, who has spent a long time organising MSDN and SQL Server user groups in Queensland, Australia. Greg is a big supporter of Code Camps, and has helped organise Code Camps in Australia and spoken in New Zealand. When I first met Greg, I was impressed by his enthusiasm and energy.

The Rational Guide to Building Technical Communities is all about improving your user group, with ideas on running your group more consistently; finding, recruiting and growing your speaker pool; recruiting volunteers; and running the meeting successfully.

The book has the following sections:

• Overview
• People, Not Technology
• Something for everyone
• Finding speakers
• Tried and true
• Starting and growing user groups
• Pizza does not define a user group
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• Recruiting members
• Content and handouts
• User group meetings and conferences
• Using technologies
• Recruiting volunteers
• Conducting meetings
• Tips for presenters
• Legal and finance
• The fine print
• Funding

Some things (like Legal and Finance), we've got sorted now in New Zealand with our incorporated society (although the section on different types of insurance we might need was an eye opener), and others I still struggle with.

Most interesting to me was how to attract and keep new members by making them feel welcome in the group. Some ideas, like introducing new members at the start of a meeting I will try out at our next meeting.

Greg repeats a marketing adage: "the easiest customer to find is the one you already have", and that's too true. Each time someone comes along to our user group, we have to give them as much opportunity as possible to stay in our group -- by pitching future topics at their level, and making sure that they know about them. In our Wellington group we're trying to have some more introductory or general purpose topics to try and appeal to more people.

In summary, I guess the most useful things I drew from this book were about the human side of running a user group. That's what I find the most enjoyable and rewarding, and Greg gives some good tips on how to make it happen.

Cheers,

Kirk

• Owen Evans from Xero will be talking about the ASP.NET MVC project
• Jonas Folleso a Senior Consultant at Capgemini and a Microsoft Regional Director for Norway will be taking us through Silverlight from a developers perspective
• Robert Fonseca-Ensor from Datacom Systems Limited will be talking about Test Driven Development and Dependency Injection
  
• Scott Hanselman, Community Liaison and blogger from Microsoft will be talking about Dynamic Data
• Ivan Towlson from Mindscape will be presenting a session on Thinking in WPF
  

• Open source or free projects you work on or use, and the cool features that mean we should check it out.
• A hot new technique you've learnt in VB, C#, Visual Studio etc.
• Come and work for my company because...
  
• I run a user group or coffee group, you should come along because...
• I'm a software vendor, and 5 minutes is all I need to sell some copies...
• Or perhaps even something humorous?