Ever since I posted about .Net Dojo, I’ve had quite a few requests to have it elsewhere. Well, after seeing Pablo’s Day of TDD and how awesome that was, I got this little notion that it might be cool to do .Net Dojo in Austin. And … also … well, this format was kinda new and I wanted to give it a trial run or two before I started doing more. So, with that said, we’ve got the very next .Net Dojo scheduled for Austin … our first one out there! It’s going to be the same as the last Houston event and, judging from the feedback that I got on the Houston Dojo, it’s gonna rock!

Here are the details:

When: November 3, 2008  1:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Where: Microsoft Austin Office

Overview:
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s strategic technology for building distributed, connected systems. Initially released with .NET 3.0, it has been significantly enhanced in .NET 3.5 to support the various web programming models including SOAP, POX, WS-*, REST and RSS/Atom syndications.  Topics covered include: SOA basics, WCF architecture, WCF bindings, hosting WCF services, WCF behaviors, WCF security and some design best practices.

What you will learn:
Stephen Fulcher will guide you through a combination of lecture and hands-on labs where we will learn how to implement the various web programming models with WCF. Specifically, we will cover SOA basics, WCF architecture, WCF bindings, hosting WCF services, WCF behaviors, WCF security and some design best practices.

Prerequisites:
To fully participate in this workshop, attendees will need an open mind and a laptop with:
-  Visual Studio 2008 Professional or higher (Trial is OK) with Service Pack 1
-  Windows PowerShell 1.0 (optional, but recommended)
-  Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard or Express
-  A CD-ROM drive to load additional components and lab files.

Now that you have the details, I know that you want to go here and register now. Hope to see y’all there!

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!!

Boy, I'm on a blogging roll today, eh? I've got one more in the works that'll go out by the end of the day too.  The ol' keyboard is taking quite the pounding. :-)

I announced this last night at HDNUG, but Bill reminded me that some folks may not remember it all (there was a lot going on last night) and besides, I meant to blog it anyway.

Bobby Schaffer's Beginning C# SIG and Harry Nystrom's C# SIG will be meeting at the Microsoft offices on Tuesday, July 15. Bobby's SIG will be kicking off at 6:00 PM, where he will be talking about Inheritance in C#. Harry's SIG kicks off, I think, at 7 (maybe 7:30) and I will be there talking about ADO.NET Data Services, a killer-cool piece of .NET Framework and Visual Studio SP1, currently in beta. For each SIG, I'll also be giving away a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional ... so, yes, that's 2 copies of Visual Studio 2008 Pro!!!

Food? Hmmm ... yeah ... typically it's BYOF (that's bring your own food). But ... ya know ... yeah, what the hell ... I'll spring for pizza & drinks.

Hey all ... I mentioned that we're getting GiveCamp finalized and we're still working on it. But ... I'm having a challenge here. A big challenge and I'm asking for some help, if you can. We need a place to have the camp ... a "givecampground" if you will. BravoTech in Dallas provided the Venue for the event there and it's been hard to find a facility down here that would work just as well. 

Here's what we need:

• Access all weekend, from Friday at about 3:00 PM to Sunday about 8:00 PM, with availability of Internet access.
• Small breakout spaces for teams. We're targeting 10-15 charities. This is actually quite easy and we have a lot of folks that can do this. Each team wouldn't necessarily need more that 1 or 2 connected cubicles. And, judging from our experience in Dallas, not every team would be there all weekend, though some certainly would be.
• Lunch area/cafe: for food to be brought in and accessible. Again, this is pretty common and easy.
• Larger meeting area/conference area/etc. that would hold about 70 people. This is the hard part. This would be for the kickoff and the closing, so it's not something that would need to be open and available for the entire weekend. Even if it's a "shared" room in the building, that's certainly a possibility.

I did have a location in mind ... and someone that agreed to let us use it, but that last bullet turned out to be the killer. I'm still following up on some leads as well, but I figured I'd reach out to the Houston community folks to see if anyone had any suggestions/comments/offers. If you do, just shoot me an email via this blog. Thanks all!