We’ve got the next .NET Dojos scheduled - Todd Anglin will be presenting Silverlight! There will be a dojo in Austin as well as Houston. Here are the details:

Overview:

Microsoft officially released Silverlight 2.0 in October 2008 as a platform for .NET developers to build rich internet applications (RIAs) that run cross-browser and cross-platform. Silverlight 2.0 introduces a whole new way of developing .NET applications. It is blurring the lines between what it means to develop for the web and the desktop, enabling .NET developers to rethink how they build and distribute applications. Topics covered include: Silverlight tools, Silverlight controls, Silverlight APIs, data access, and some security.

What you will learn:

Todd Anglin will guide you through a combination of lecture and hands-on labs where you will learn everything you need to know to get started with Silverlight 2.0. Specifically, you’ll learn how to work with Silverlight in Visual Studio and Expression Blend, how to use Silverlight controls, how to interact with the HTML DOM, how to access and manipulate data, how to use isolated storage, and secure your Silverlight applications. We’ll go from Silverlight 101 to 301 in about 4 hours and you’ll leave with all the essential tools you need to start building real applications with Silverlight today.

Prerequisites:

To fully participate in this workshop, attendees will need a laptop with the following:

·        Visual Studio 2008 Professional or higher (trial is okay) with Service Pack 1 installed

·        Expression Blend 2.0 or higher (trial is okay) with Service Pack 1 installed

·        Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installed (free)

·        Deep Zoom Composer installed (free)

·        Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 or higher (available on CodePlex)

Times, dates and registration links:

Austin (Microsoft Office): March 9, 2009 1:00 – 5:00 PM. Register now.

Houston (Microsoft Office): March 13, 2009 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM. Register now.

Finally getting caught up on getting my presentation content posted.

First, there’s the “Building your First Cloud Service” that I delivered at the Aggieland .NET User Group and the North Houston .NET User Group.

Next, there are 2 presentations from Houston TechFest: The OWASP Top Ten Review and the ASP.NET Url Routing demo. Enjoy!

Sessions, that is, that I’m doing or participating in. :-)

First, I’ll be participating in Zain’s session on VIrtual Worlds and Virtual World Evangelism. I’ll only be showing a bit of stuff for a few minutes … really just to showcase some of the things that can be done in Second Life.

Next … the one that I signed up for originally … the OWASP Top Ten. This will review the vulnerabilities on the OWASP Top 10 (duh!), explaining each one and explaining how the .NET (and ASP.NET) platform can help you mitigate these vulnerabilities. It’s been very well received when I’ve done it on other occasions and it’s security … something that I’m pretty passionate about.

Finally … this just in and HOT off the presses (as in, I just finished writing the demo!) … I’ll be doing a session on add Url Routing (from Fx 3.5 SP1) to existing applications. It’s already the magic goo behind MVC and Dynamic Data … but there’s no reason that you can’t use it for your current apps to provide clean, purty Urls in your applications. I’ll start at the very beginning with an ASP.NET app with all kinds of ugly Urls - they grew organically, so there’s no consistency in the names which, of course never happens in the Real World(tm). Then I’ll add routing in step by step by step … culminating in adding in a configurable (as in, from the web.config), reusable routing component for adding to these types of applications. Should be pretty cool. I’ll post the code for this when I’m done and I’m certainly using this in CSK.

So … with that, I’m outta here and I’ll see (some of) you tomorrow at TechFest!!

I have uploaded (finally) the presentation that I delivered to the C# SIG last Wednesday, July 16 to my SkyDrive. You can download it here.

I did make some little modifications to it though ... and they address one of the outstanding questions of the evening ... how does ASP.NET Role-based security work with ASP.NET Dynamic Data? Well, it's pretty simple and straightforward, actually.

Some background first. ASP.NET Dynamic Data uses SP1's UrlRoutingModule to map requests to the correct table ... with the name of the table appearing as a directory on the web site. So, when editing the "Products" table, the URL will be http://mydatasite/Products/[NameOfView]. Adding authentication and authorization for the entire site is a no-brainer; just add the authorization element into the web.config with the proper entries and you're done. Doing it for individual tables is just about as easy; in this case, you just need to add a location element to your web.config and configure the settings for the location. For example:

<location path="products">
  <system.web>
    <authorization>
      <allow roles="Products"/>
      <deny users="*"/>
    </authorization>
  </system.web>
</location>

In this case, we have defined a role called "Products" that can edit (and view, of course) the products table, but no one else can. This will behave exactly as would a "real" folder in any ASP.NET web site using role-based authorization with the built-in RoleManager (regardless of where the roles are actually coming from!).

As I said, I added this to the demos that I uploaded. All access to the site is authenticated; no anonymous users are allowed. There are 2 roles - Products, which can edit the Products table and HR, which can edit the Employees table - and 3 users. All users have the same password (Pass@word1). Here's the breakdown:

You can, of course, get a bit more complicated than this, but you'd have to do some additional customization of the different pages to do that.

In my previous post, I said that I'd be talking about ADO.NET Data Service. I'm not sure what happened to my brain, but that's not what I told Harry. I will actually be talking about ADO.NET Dynamic Data. Hope to see you there tomorrow!!