A bit of housekeeping…
Well, since this blog has been down, a few new reads have popped into my RSS Reader…
I’ve added Jeff Prosise to the list of reads on my blog, and updated the URL to Cameron Reilly’s blog.
I’ll add a few more feeds later tonight.
Actually, just before I go just like to say that I saw Jeff Prosise present about a year ago in Melbourne, Australia. Absolutely brilliant speaker. I was quite impressed with 1) the topic which he presented (security related topic… one of which I remember to be about SQL Injections, Cross Site Scripting attacks) and 2) The way he presented.
In regards to #2, he wasn’t boring. Which is always a good start. And what helped was probably the topics that he presented weren’t boring ones.
His presentation last year did keep my interest beyond the presentation. I think that weekend I started to look for more information on the topics. Though I was aware of website hacking through scripts and so on, don’t know what, but that presentation triggured my brain to go seek out more information. Which is a good thing!
That was actually the first Microsoft presentation I went to. It was the June or July MSDN Update (I don’t recall which month… I think it was July). It was held on campus (Monash University, Caulfield Campus to be precise). And I think it was mid year break, which gave me an even better reason to attend. So, no excuses whatsover to not attend.
What amused me a little bit on that morning was the number of people who got lost… Ok, maybe not so amusing at all. It’s easy to tell when people are lost, they hold up their little pieces of paper with the details of where they have to goto, as they try to decipher the Monash Uni room numbering system!
Let’s see now… It was in B3.09 (I think…). There were people on the first floor (I went to the computer labs on the first floor because I was early, nobody was around… Did some email checking, etc… People started coming when I was coming out of the labs). This is where the Student Orientation and Monash Open Day guide part of me sprung out and asked them 1) if they were lost (which quite obviously they were) and 2) if they were here for the MSDN Update… Their responses were to the tune of, “yes, we’re here for the Microsoft event. Can you tell me where it is”.
Oh, just dug up one of my old blog entries (yes, one from the blog that has now been offline for awhile… but I have SQL dump of the database so not hard to retrieve it. Just have to remove all the HTML encoding and carriage returns)…
So here it is… DateTime: 01 07 2003 12:45:30 (That’s July 1st.)
Yesterday was a good day for me, learnt a lot.
I attended MSDN June Update which focussed on “power programming in .NET using ADO.NET, ASP.NET and PAG” (PAG = Microsoft’s Prescriptive Architecture Group).
Learnt a lot from the two speakers Jeff Prosise and Dan Green who were both quite good. I feel that there was much that I learnt and much I can put into practice. Some of the issues mentioned by Jeff are not issues which related to ASP.NET, but rather to things that most developers need to be aware of. Such as HACK attacks on websites, how to combat them, and what we should not do, and what to be careful of! The crowd was quite receptive of both speakers IMHO.
The good thing, would probably be because I could see what areas of my scripts/programs I have written may well be vulnerable to such attacks.
Free lunch was provided, but I didn’t really want to stick around too long, so decided to go for a walk to the plaza area across the road and buy myself something else.
But all in all, a great day!