It’s almost time for TechFest again … it’s amazing how quickly the time flies! It’s seems like only yesterday that I told Michael what my sessions would be, thinking, of course, that I’d have plenty of time to do them. No, it wasn’t yesterday either – it was a few months ago. But … I’m just now starting to do the presentations. While there is a blurb about the sessions on the TechFest site, I also wanted to post them here – with some more information.

Customizing TFS Process Template – Level 300

Or maybe it’s level 400. This is not going to be your every day talk about customizing process templates; there is plenty of that out there. While I may mention (and even, very briefly, show) the TFS Process Template Editor Power Tool, that’s not what I’m going to focus on. I’ll be digging into the core of what makes these templates work and how they are configured behind the scenes. This means that we’ll be playing in the XML behind the templates. We will look – deeply – at how the templates are constructed and where all of the pieces are. I’ll also share some code utilities that I’ve developed to help create process templates from an existing Team Project; specifically, I’ll show code to export work items and work item queries. I’ll also mention how to do custom plugins for the Project Creation Wizard, allowing you to really “kick it up a notch!”

Team Foundation Build 2010

With Team Foundation Server 2010 Build Server, the build services got a complete redesign, moving away from an MSBuild-based build process to a more flexible and extensible build process based on Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0. I will talk about TFS build, the architecture and how to configure build controllers and agents. From there, I’ll be digging into the Build Process Templates, how to customize and extend them with out-of-the-box activities as well as custom activities, as well as some tips and tricks about how to manage extensions and your build environment. Finally, I’ll talk about the upgrade path from TFS 2005/2008 builds (yes, there is one) and some of the gotchas that you may experience on the way. I’ve not yet decided which activity to use as an example, but I’m leaning towards using the one that I wrote to change the build workspace as a part of the process. Or the zip activity. Or both? We’ll see.

Keep in mind … this is the kind of stuff that I do all day, every day, day in and day out. Those of you who know me also know that I’m not one to settle for touching on the surface but get deep into the technical aspects … these sessions will be no different. They will not be your typical TFS sessions. There will be code - and a goodly chunk of it - that works with the mysterious and very poorly documented TFS APIs.

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!!

Hello Houston … we have a new user group in town. After some delay due to an unwelcome visitor whose name begins with “I”, the Houston Developer 2 Designer (D2) SIG is holding its inaugural meeting this Thursday. Regular meetings will be on the first Tuesday of the month, but this first one was moved to Thursday so that it didn’t prevent anyone from voting (which you are doing, right???).

Inaugural Houston-Area D2 SIG Meeting for Silverlight & WPF Designers and Developers Announced (Free)
When: First Tuesday of Each Month 6:00 – 8:00 PM (First meeting is Thursday, November 6, due to Election Day)
Where: Microsoft-Houston Offices (2000 West Sam Houston Parkway)
This special interest group (SIG) is a community effort open to all interested participants. Each month, a different presenter from various organizations will present to interested attendees. The group is dedicated to exploring modern user experiences (UX) which are part computer programming and part artistic design. While traditionally there has been little overlap in the two disciplines, users now expect a good experience with a professional look. Covered topics will range from development in Silverlight, WPF and related technologies such as Microsoft Surface to design of rich interactive experience for graphical designers. The group strives to provide a good balance of content that appeals to both developers and designers.
The inaugural meeting, to be held on Nov. 6th, 2008 introduces the SIG and the covered topics and technologies in general, before proceeding into this month’s presentation delivered by industry renowned expert, author, speaker, MVP, President of EPS Software Corp., and Publisher of CoDe Magazine, Markus Egger. Markus’ presentation will include the following topics:

• Introduction to Silverlight ans WPF (Windows)
• Creating a Silverlight Application
• Silverlight and WPF news from PDC!
• A first look at Microsoft Surface

RSVP Requested
Attendance of the SIG meetings is free. To allow us to plan the meetings better and to judge interest ahead of time, we ask people to RSVP here. (Signup through VPF Conversion is temporary and will be replaced in the future with www.d2sig.org.)

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!!