* What are Microsoft DevDays?
Can you call yourself a developer? Can you do it without giggling? Can you do it in public, without people pointing at you and hooting? Note that I didn’t ask if you are actively developing software, just if you could act like a developer. Because if you can, then there’s a conference coming up you might want to attend.
Microsoft’s DevDays event will be coming to 32 cities around the country beginning in New York City on Feb. 23 (see the full schedule at https://www.microsoft.com/seminar/devdays2004/registration.mspx). It’ll cost you $75 (or $99 if you wait until after Feb. 10 to register), but it’s money well spent – even if you aren’t creating the next “big thing” in Web services.
Not only will you walk away with a pre-release “Technology Preview” copy of Microsoft Visual Studio (the one codenamed “Whidbey”), but also sample code for all sessions as well as source code to the Microsoft reference application, “OpenHack,” a tour-de-force of Web security best practices (it survived more than 80,000 public hack attempts). You get that because this one-day of technology seminars is devoted to security issues. According to the brochure, among the many topics covered will be “…the ins and outs of secure data access, building secure Web applications, locating and countering potential security threats, and much more.” A whole lot more. See the DevDays Web site for all the details.
When I first became a network manager, I could barely create a “Hello World!” application in Microsoft Basic. But I attended a few conferences aimed at developers – people using C and Assembly code – and learned quite a lot. Not about coding, I hasten to add, but about how operating systems and network applications really work. Knowing how they work can help when it comes time to install or deploy the apps. And knowing how they work is a big help when it comes to planning security for those apps.
Who knows? You might just develop a taste for “roll your own” coding, I know I did.
