Community developer blogs

Barry Dorrans

Recent Posts

• DDD7: 10 tricks & tips for WCF

  Posted: 22 Nov 2008 at 12:26

  Well I didn't manage to get socks stuck on the projector this time around. The slide deck and demos are available for download. Every DDD session this year has been filmed; so if you missed it watch the DDD site for the video. Technorati Tags: developer day,ddd,ddd7

• Get Safe Online Week

  Posted: 17 Nov 2008 at 09:56

  This week is Get Safe Online week; a campaign founded by the Government, HSBC, SOCA and Microsoft. The campaign site, http://www.getsafeonline.org/ is aimed at the "mum" user, people who don't know about the ins and outs of security; the people who are at risk the most. This year they're focusing on

• An illustration of social engineering

  Posted: 13 Nov 2008 at 07:07

  Last night my twitter feed started filling up with messages about Twitterank; in fact there are so many messages that it's currently in the top 10 trends for the day on tweetscans.com. Looking at the people in my feed who used it; a few MVPs, a bunch of Microsoft staffers and a couple of other tec

• Hoots mon, DDD Scotland isnae deed

  Posted: 12 Nov 2008 at 09:53

  Well jiggle ma sporran 'n warm up the sheepsies Morag; DDD Scotland returns on the 2nd May 2009. We'll all be gaing to Gaslgie then; but didnae Connor say "There can be only one?" (Of course now I shouldn't submit a topic or two because I am going to get eggs thrown at me. Except eggs are expensive,

• Self certified identities and high risk transactions

  Posted: 09 Nov 2008 at 15:22

  Warning opinion follows :) A while back I blogged on the difference between self issued and managed information cards; which lead to an interesting comment from Aditya; I was wondering if you could further explain why a self-issued information card is not suitable for higher-risk transactions such

• Need your UK government ID card? Apply at WH Smiths

  Posted: 06 Nov 2008 at 11:26

  Pretty much everyone who knows me knows I want stronger authentication on the internet, but I'm set against physical identity cards, and centralised government databases. I've even opted out of the UK's National Health Service central database (partly because I don't trust the NHS to protect the dat

• VBug2008 - WCF101

  Posted: 06 Nov 2008 at 10:55

  Yesterday I presented to a bunch of hungover VBug members; giving a gentle introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (if only all WCF applications were that easy). Thank you to all who attended and especially those who asked questions. Someone did ask about client and server communication; I

• Microsoft and OpenID. *yawn*

  Posted: 28 Oct 2008 at 09:13

  So yesterday Dare announced that Microsoft, via Live ID were becoming an OpenID provider.Big whoop.So why am I so ambivalent? Being an OpenID provider is meaningless for Microsoft unless they start to accept OpenIDs for their services. At the moment be it on Microsoft.com, the Microsoft forums, Chan

• Windows Azure? The cloud OS?

  Posted: 27 Oct 2008 at 11:43

  At 11:30 GMT a new blog popped up on MSDN; the "Cloud Computing" blog. Admittedly there's not much there, a bunch of dead links; but everything is being described as Windows "Azure". So does this mean it's not Windows Strata? Or that Azure is the SDK?Either way the name is interesting; if only becau

• DDD#7 Registration Open

  Posted: 22 Oct 2008 at 09:32

  The agenda is set, the waiting is over, registration is open. If it's anything like last time you have about 12 hours to register before all the spaces are gone ...Technorati Tags: DDD,DDD#7

• Upgrading hard drives; or why WHS just isn't enough sometimes.

  Posted: 13 Oct 2008 at 09:33 by Barry Dorrans

  So last week, because of a 50Gb Virtual Machine containing an entire development environment my hard drive icon turned bright red in Explorer as I only had 1Gb of free space left (showing my age here but even that is huge to me, remember I started with a machine with a 8" floppy drive which you coul

• DDD7 - Top 10 WCF Tips & Tricks

  Posted: 10 Oct 2008 at 06:49 by Barry Dorrans

  I got the email last night that my session Top 10 WCF Tips & Tricks was selected for DDD7. DDD sessions are voted on by potential attendees so it's always an honour to get selected; and this will now be the 7th DDD I've presented at. So put the date in your diary and come down to the Microsoft o

• Oh I can keep my shiny badge!

  Posted: 01 Oct 2008 at 15:23 by Barry Dorrans

  "Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others." Technorati Tags: MVP,Microsoft MVP,Microsoft Most Valued Professional

• Look ma! I'm an author.

  Posted: 16 Sep 2008 at 18:33 by Barry Dorrans

  Well; in a few months anyway. A month or so ago I saw a tweet flit past asking for someone who has ASP.NET security knowledge; someone pointed the user my way. I assumed it was someone just asking for advice, so I sent off something along the lines of "What do you need to know?". It turns out the r

• That MS advert ...

  Posted: 07 Sep 2008 at 22:01 by Barry Dorrans

  I think Craig has way too much time on his hands; but one thing occurred to me con·quis·ta·dor one of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the 16th century. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Conquistador (accessed: September 07, 2008

• Encouraging "les auteurs" - we have a winner

  Posted: 02 Sep 2008 at 09:40 by Barry Dorrans

  Developer Day voting is open and there are a large number of sessions you can choose from. A while back I threw out a challenge to the girl geek community to try to encourage more female speakers and we ended up with three potential speakers from the fairer sex, one from an MVP, Bev Hatchard who we

• My Information Card logins don't work any more - .NET 3.5 breaking change

  Posted: 30 Aug 2008 at 15:57 by Barry Dorrans

  A couple of weeks back I tried to login to signon.com, my preferred OpenID provider. I use signon.com because it accepts Information Cards for authentication, so that's one less password to remember. However it didn't work; which was strange. I noticed that blogs I had used Information Cards on befo

• nxtgenug Oxford: Helen Emerson on JSON

  Posted: 27 Aug 2008 at 11:11 by Barry Dorrans

  Monday sees Helen Emerson come out to Oxford to present on JSON, her very well received session first deliver at DDD. The object model in Javascript looks pretty foreign the first time you see it, particularly if you're from mainstream languages like C#, Java or VB.NET. In my talk I'm going to explo

• UK SQL user group inaugural meeting

  Posted: 27 Aug 2008 at 10:59 by Barry Dorrans

  Thursday sees the first meeting of the UK SQL user group in exciting Milton Keynes, home of, errr, concrete cows. It sees Tony Rogerson talking about common table expressions and Simon Sabin talking about new features in SQL 2008. You can find more details on the sqlserverfaq website. (If you're thi

• Learn VB.NET with the Open University

  Posted: 20 Aug 2008 at 12:56 by Barry Dorrans

  My OU degree is almost done; by December of next year I will hopefully have a BSc (Honours) in Computing and Systems Practice. In order to finish the degree I had to accumulate 360 points by choosing courses from an applicable list and 30 points from "free choice". I had already booked the courses f