I went to the DevDays in NYC last week. Sorry it took so long to get this recap in, things have been a bit hectic lately. Plus, somehow there was no wifi connectivity offered, so I was completely cut off from the world while I was there.
I haven't had a chance to watch the sessions I missed yet, but I hope to get to them soon.
Overall I was pretty disappointed with the conference. I've never been to a lot of confererences, but I got the impression from the marketing that this was geared “towards developers”. It's not for .NET developers, it's for people who think they might want to be .NET developers. As Doug later explained, this is actually partially by design, but it's no less disappointing.
First, I want to point out (as I did on the reviews) that the speakers themselves were excellent - it was the content that I wasn't thrilled with (and the speakers had nothing to do with the content).
The keynote had very little substance. Not only was it all marketing, but it was all regurgitated marketing. I'm sure I've seen at least a few of those slides at the Office launch and similar events. I expected that from the free Office launch - I had higher expectations for this.
There was a decent BizTalk 2004 and Infopath demonstration, showing distributed transactions with Access and SQL Server 2000. Some powerful stuff there, of course.
SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is now available as well. I'm sure others here have given better overviews on this, but it's a free extensible reporting engine that supports Excel, PDF, and HTML (among other) outputs. It is also programmable via a SOAP API. The WinForms 'integration' they showed was pretty lame though - it was just hosting an IE window in it. There will be no first-class control until Yukon.
They also showed a quick bit on Whitehorse functionality in Whidbey. I've been excited about Whitehorse since we first saw the preview awhile back, and it's exciting to see some of the stuff they have slated beyond round-trip engineering and other Visio-like features.
I started out in the Smart Client track. The first session was just a demo of the IssueVisuion application, with some discussion on patterns in general and specifically some of the patterns implemented by the application. Overall, not a lot of substance, but it was probably just setting the stage for the following sessions which were discussing the application.
We decided to switch to the Secure Web Applications track to go to Stephen's talk about Threats & Threat Modeling session being given by Stephen. Good choice - I think this was my favorite session of the day. I'm pretty familiar with the vulnerabilities he discussed, working in application security and all, but it was an excellent overview on how they work and why they are problems. Good demonstration about the threat modeling too. The basic formula in Torts law - probability * loss - is of course of the most basic and code models for assessing risk here. Everything else derives from this in some form or another :)
We went to the bar at lunch and ended up missing the third session - countermeasures - but I'll watch it at some point.
Doug did the final session, an overview of the OpenHack application development by Microsoft. Some good best practices here. Doug emphasized the idea that ease of deployment and security are often inversely proportional - for example, one of the things they do in this application is encrypt the connection string specific to the machine and store it in the registry. Actually, that led to one of the funniest questions after the talk: someone asked Doug how they would go about encrypting the connection string if they didn't have access to the registry. Sigh.
I had to walk out of the final session, the Whidbey preview, only because I've seen it so many times before. What I did see was a demo of one of my favorite new features for team environments - code formatting. Finally, no more worrying about personal style preferences - I can have my curly braces on the next line and you can have it on the same line.
We tried to all meet up at the Ginger Man after the event, but Microsoft took the speakers out to Houlihan's across the street. Donny ended up meeting up with Doug there, and eventually we all met up across the street at Under The Volcano. Some good conversation that got louder as the night went on.... :)
Unfortunately, Sam couldn't make it (although I did manage to catch up with him recently). Sean and Addy were going to come, but the lack of connectivity nixed that one. I guess I should have posted and coordinated more in advance. Oh well - both are in the city and we're planning another get-together in the near future. For those interested and/or in the area, I'll keep you posted.