Recent Updates Page 72

This morning when Scott and I arrived at the convention center, the bean bag chairs were all piled together, and it was too much to take.  We just _had_ to belly-flop on them.  Here is a video of our antics.  Just click on the picture:
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Tonight after the NHibernate session, which lasted until 10PM, 7 of use went to grab a bite to eat because we hadn’t eaten supper.  We had some pretty good geek talk and some heresy about using DataSets and putting business logic in the UI (I heard arguments _for_ this approach if you can believe it).  Here’s a picture of the table.  It was fun.
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[Picture no longer available]At this Tech Ed, I’ve had a chance to meet Carl Franklin, Mark Dunn, and Richard Campbell.  Here is a picture of Mark Dunn on the left and Carl Franklin on the right.  Todd is standing in the middle.  He was having a conversation when I rudely interrupted.  🙂

Scott Bellware gave a BoF on NHibernate, and while BoF’s aren’t supposed to have media, Scott was able to plug in his laptop and show some NHibernate configuration files and consuming code.  Most in the audience were skeptical about O-R mappers to begin with, and some made objections.  One guy complained that his devs came from a procedural background and don’t know OO that well, so NHibernate doesn’t work for them.  He said it as if that was somebody else’s problem.  I told him that if his devs don’t know OO, then that’s a bigger problem, and everything else is irrelevent. 

I’ve tried out NHibernate, and I intend to incorporate it at some point in my EZWeb CMS.

Caleb Jenkins from INETA helped out with the BoF.

Don Demcsak (DonXml) gave a BoF about Xslt2, XQuery and Saxon.net.  He covered what is and what is not included regarding these features in .Net 2.0.  XQuery is included in Yukon, but not the .Net framework 2.0.  This is because the specification has not been ratified, and Microsoft got burned the last time they released something based on an unratified specification with Xsl in IE 5.  Saxon.net seeks to make up for the lack of this feature.

Scott Bellware, along with Darren Norton facilitated a Birds of a Feather session on Test-Driven Development.  There was a very large turn-out that only left standing room.  Most of the attendees were interested in TDD, but they weren’t practitioners, so the session started out with an overview.  James Newkirk even came, but he hid out in the back until he was discovered.  James Avery and Dave Donaldson also hid in the back and didn’t say much.

There was some good discussion about how to keep TDD from slowing down a project, and we made it clear that TDD is a rigorous methodology and will require a learning curve, so just like you have to learn .Net, then you become more productive, it is the same way with TDD.

This session was not about SOA but about dealing with data in an SOA. This issue he brings to light is that many systems cannot have a single source of data because of the amount of data. Huge databases that grow 40% per year. The data has to be partitioned in some manner, but after partitioning, how is it queried? That becomes a problem.

Architects have to camps: “object-siders” and “data-siders”.

Object-siders start with objects, but Data-siders think of everything in terms of the database.

John speaks of the beginning of OO, through Components, to SO in terms of evolution. I’m not sure I agree with this because evolution implies that SO is the superset of the beginnings, but I think it’s just another layer above and around OO and components

In this presentation, data is owned by different services. Data is partitioned among different services that use each other to get a job done. It’s clear which service owns which data. This presentation is very high-level and very abstract, and he doesn’t go into much detail about where actual applications fit into his model. He talks only of services and how they talk to each other. In my experience, services don’t talk to other services. Application talk to services, and services are owned by applications, but service code doesn’t engage in two-way interaction with other service code. The consumption direction is one-way.

One thing I really liked is that John refuted the idea that SO kills OO. He emphasizes that services are built with OO-components.

John concludes that architecture is very hard and is a game of trade-offs. He advises us to “be very careful” when trying to factor existing systems into services.

Jesper Johansson gave a session on the Anatomy of a network hack: How to get your network hacked in 10 easy steps. He set up a local network with several machines and hacked through a SQL injection attack, through an outer domain controller, to the corporate domain controller, and took over the entire network. He used several command-line tools and several built-in windows tools to accomplish the hack. The guy next to me got very depressed and declared after the talk, “I’m going to unplug all my servers.” Security is a very real concern, and IT Pros need to be experts on security, but the problem is that if you don’t know how to hack, you don’t know how to secure against those hacks. I don’t pretend to know a lot of hacks, but I’ve committed to knowing application security. If the server on which my application runs is vulnerable, then we may be sunk anyway. It was a great session, and Jesper is a great speaker.

How to get your network hacked in 10 easy steps:
1. Don’t patch anything.
2. Run unhardened applications.
3. Use one admin account, everywhere.
4. Open lots of holes in the firewall.
5. Restrict internal traffic.
6. Allow all outbound traffic.
7. Don’t harden servers. Run them in the default configuration.
8. Reuse your passwords everywhere.
9. Use high-level service accounts in multiple places.
10. Assume everything is OK.

I woke up later than I wanted this morning, but I didn’t intend to make the keynote anyway.  By the way, there isn’t any significant wireless access at the convention center.   I haven’t been able to connect at all.  I wasn’t planning on it anyway because I always bring my Sprint phone with the USB cable, and I can get on the Net anywhere I have signal.  I’ll never count on wireless access at a conference.  In my hotel it’s pretty good.

I’ve recently accepted a new position as the INETA liaison for south Texas.  I’ll be the contact point for several user groups to help them with INETA-related matters.  I look forward to contributing more to the developer community beyond leading the Austin .Net User Group.