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Windows Phone 7 Advanced Training Today!

Windows Phone 7 deviceI know that this is incredibly short notice, but I just heard about it myself:

Join us on September 21 2010 at 8.00 am PDT (11:00 EDT) for the first of two Office Live Meeting broadcasts.

The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 marketplace will open in October, and Microsoft wants to help you make your app the best that it can be. If you would like to ensure that you’ve considered key submission criteria and that your app is of the highest quality, this free live training is for you!

Join Rob S. Miles and Andy Wigley once again (both MS Press authors and MVP’s) for an engaging training on advanced topics for Windows Phone 7 application and game development.

We’re also including a session on Windows Phone Design and Designing with Blend, taught by Microsoft SME’s Bryan Agnetta and Jon Harris. Bryan is a Senior User interface Program Manager in the design studio for Windows Phone 7 team. His responsibilities include managing the Design Integration team and Program Manager for Application development in the studio. His 9+ year tenure at Microsoft has all been with the Windows Phone User Experience team. Jon is the Senior Product Manager for Expression Blend and SketchFlow. He joined Microsoft as the first User Experience Evangelist! And now 4 years later, 4 releases of Blend, 4 releases of Silverlight and a new release of Blend 4 for Windows Phone… you get the benefit of his expertise in this session.

The last hour is dedicated to the questions you have. We’ve pulled together a panel of Microsoft SME’s in addition to Rob, Andy, Jon and Bryan. Through the Live Meeting Q&A function, you can get all your Windows Phone 7 development questions answered real time.

Sign up for both Part One and Part Two to get full coverage.

Here’s the agenda:

Part One: Tuesday, September 21, 2010, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. EDT

Click here to register for Part One.

Time Subject
11:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. EDT Panorama and Pivots
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. XNA Deep Dive (includes a 10-minute break)

 

Part Two: September 21, 2010, 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. EDT

Click here to register for Part Two.

Time Subject
3:00 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. EDT Bing Maps
4:00 p.m. – 4:50 p.m. Planning and Optimizing for Performance
5:00 p.m. – 5:50 p.m. Windows Phone 7 Design and Design using Microsoft Blend
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Live Q&A Panel with Microsoft SME’s

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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ScottGu’s Workaround for the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

The ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

Poster for the movie "Hackers"

Chances are that you’ve seen the Microsoft Security Advisory, but in case you haven’t here’s the "tl;dr" version:

  • There’s a vulnerability in ASP.NET that was publically disclosed late on Friday at a security conference.
  • An attacker using this vulnerability can:
    • Request and download files within an ASP.NET application like the web.config file (which often contains sensitive data).
    • Decrypt data sent to the client in an encrypted state (like ViewState data within a page).

How Does the Vulnerability Work?

The vulnerability is based on a cryptographic oracle. When talking amongst the crypto crowd, an “oracle” refers to a system that gives away hints if you ask it the right questions.

Within ASP.NET, there’s a vulnerability that acts like a “padding oracle”. An attacker can send ciphertext to the web server and learn if it was decrypted properly by looking at the error code returned by the server. Make lots of requests like that while keeping track of the error codes returned, and you can learn enough to decrypt the ciphertext.

How Do You Work Around the Vulnerability (the high-level version)?

The vulnerability works because of the different error codes returned by the server. The workaround is to change the error handling withing ASP.NET so that it always sends the same error each time, regardless of the error, thereby cancelling the “oracular” behaviour.

More specifically, this involves enabling the <customErrors> feature of ASP.NET and mapping all errors to return the same error page.

How Do You Work Around the Vulnerability (the step-by-step version)?

Scott Guthrie’s blog has the step-by-step instructions for:

  • Working around the vulnerability
  • Making sure that the workaround has been enabled
  • Finding vulnerable ASP.NET applications on your server
  • Finding out more about the vulnerability

If you’ve got an ASP.NET-based application, make sure you’ve set up the workaround!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Upcoming Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Codes / Deployment Clinics

coffee and code

Update (Sept. 21 @ 6:15 p.m. EDT): Made some corrections to the schedule.

We’re out there, and we want to help you with your Windows Phone 7 development by giving you a chance to deploy your apps to an advance-release Windows Phone 7 device for testing! We’ll be in the following cities on the following dates:

Wednesday, September 22 in Ottawa (Coffee and Code)

Colin Melia and Rick “Claus” Claus from Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team will be at Bridgehead Cafe (224 Dalhousie Street) from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to host a Coffee and Code there. Drop in, say hi, have a coffee, ask questions and if you’ve got an app, try deploying it to a real live Windows Phone 7 device!

Thursday, September 23 in Toronto (Coffee and Code)

Join Kate Gregory and me as we host a Coffee and Code at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (4 King Street West) from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., where we’ll merge with the Coffee and iOS group who are coming in at 4:00 p.m.. Want to find out more about WP7 or iOS development? This is the time and place!

See Kate’s blog entry about this Coffee and Code.

Wednesday, September 29 in Montreal (Coffee and Code)

Join “les bons gars”, Christian Beauclair and Guy Barrette, who’ll be holding a Coffee and Code at Le Café de la Cité on 75 Queen. They put on a professional appearance, but we all know qu’ils vont ecrire des «fart apps»! They’ll be doing it in both official languages: Silverlight and XNA!

Thursday, September 30 in Montreal (Deployment Clinic)

Deployment clinics are a little more formal than Coffee and Codes. You can book an exclusive timeslot to deploy and test apps to a Windows Phone 7 device, and there’s one taking place all day at Microsoft’s Montreal office (2000 Avenue McGill College, 4th floor) on the 30th. Email Christian Beauclair to reserve a time slot.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Tonight at HacklabTO: Cooking for Geeks!

Cover of "Cooking for Geeks"

If you’re in or around Toronto’s Kensington Market area tonight, you might want to drop by the Hacklab (170a Baldwin Street, above Graffiti’s) to see O’Reilly author Jeff Potter as his book tour for Cooking for Geeks stops at Toronto’s downtown hackerspace. He’ll be there, talking about his book and possibly treating us to a demo or two, and I’ll be there, helping to host the event. Jeff says he’ll have a number of books on him for sale – but note that it’s first come, first serve, and I’m buying one!

Here’s a video of the author showing you how to make ice cream in 30 seconds (with liquid nitrogen!):

The event starts tonight (Monday, September 20th) at 7:00 p.m. – be there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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FITC Mobile 2010

FITC Mobile 2010: The Windows Phone 7 booth

What is FITC?

What a week! On Thursday, I was in Vancouver at the Take 5 Cafe making an all-too-brief appearance at the Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code, and on Friday I was at FITC Mobile 2010 in Toronto, minding the Windows Phone 7 booth.

FITC Mobile 2010 is part of a larger group of conferences called Mobile Innovation Week, which took place in Toronto last week and comprised:

FITC logoFITC (pronounced “Fit-See” by those in the know) is a descendant of the Toronto Flash user group FlashinTO, which I know from my old days as a Macromedia Director developer working at a little interactive shop called Mackerel. Local Flash/interactive media guru Shawn Pucknell started the group, and from it came a Toronto-based event in 2002 called “Flash in the Can”. Since then, the events have spread all over the world and expanded to cover more topics, so Flash in the Can became FITC. It’s great to see that Shawn’s still directing FITC, and it was good to chat with him – it’s been too long – and we’ve got to talk sometime about how Microsoft can participate in other FITC events.

(And now you know why the FITC logo features an old-school can opener.)

This was FITC Mobile’s second year. Its goal was to cover as wide an assortment of aspects of mobile development and content development as possible, with presentations, demonstration and panel discussions. The schedule was packed with all sorts of useful sessions, which covered:

  • Mobile operating systems: Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone 7
  • Tools: Flash, HTML5, Unity and Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone
  • Ideas: Marketing, usability, design, Canada’s place in the mobile world and the current state of Canada’s mobile industry

What I Saw

I spent most of my time at the Windows Phone 7 booth, showing off the phone and the development tools to passers-by. I did manage to get away and take a peek at some of the presentations, including:

Here are the slides from Paul Trani’s Mobile Design That Doesn’t Suck session:

Here area couple of photos I snapped at Mark Arteaga’s Windows Phone 7 presentation:

View of Mark Arteaga's presentation from the back of the room

View of Mark Arteaga's presentation from the front of the room

The “Booth Brains”

Anthony Vranic and Sean Kearney hack away as Barranger Ridler and Cory Fowler demonstrate Windows Phone 7 to a visitor to the booth

On Friday, I minded the booth with my coworkers Mandy Kaur, Yue He, Paul Laberge and Anthony Bartolo, but I was the only one available on Saturday. I put out a call for “Booth Brains” and got a number of responses. In the end, these four local heroes came in for the whole day:

  • Cory Fowler
  • Sean Kearney
  • Barranger Ridler
  • Anthony Vranic

My thanks to you four (and Yue, who showed up for a couple of hours too!) I couldn’t have done Saturday without your help.

Barranger Ridler and Cory Fowler demonstrating Windows Phone 7 to a booth visitor

We had a great number of people show up to the booth, curious about Windows Phone 7. We showed them the development tools – Visual Studio Express for Phone, Expression Blend and the WP7 emulator – and they got to get their mitts on an actual Windows Phone 7 device. Everyone who came by was impressed by the look, feel and responsiveness of WP7; I think we changed more than a few minds there.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from TechDays Vancouver, Part 5: Day 2 and Beyond

Day 0 (The Day Before)

TechDays typically happens on a Tuesday and a Wednesday; we usually arrive on the Sunday or Monday in order to prepare the venue, our speakers and our own presentations. The afternoon of Day 0 is usually spent setting up the computers in each of the track rooms and in the Collaboration Lounge and “Ask the Experts” areas.

Here’s Christian Beauclair taking a tour of the facilities on the afternoon before TechDays.

Christian Beauclair in the hallway at Vancouver Conventioon Centre's West Building

I usually see Samantha Wong at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga, but last week she was with us at TechDays Vancouver, minding the table for the WebsiteSpark program, which gives free development tools available to eligible fee-for-service web design shops.

Samantha Wong, minding the WebsiteSpark table

We made the TechDays venue available to CloudCamp on the evening of Day 0. The Vancouver one was quite well-attended. John Bristowe, pictured below with the camera, took some photos of the crowd:

A crowd of CloudCamp attendees gathering as John Bristowe takes a photo of them

We’re usually quite busy with other things on the evenings of Day 1 and Day 2, so we hold the speaker dinner on the evening of Day 0. We took the speakers to Town Hall, where they got a chance to hang out with us over food and drinks and play with the new Windows Phone 7 devices. Morten Rand-Hendriksen seemed particularly delighted to take WP7 out for a spin:

Morten Rand-Hendriksen smiles maniacally as he holds a Windows Phone 7 device

Day 1

Here’s track host Miguel Carrasco delivering a short introductory presentation for “Developing for Three Screens and the Cloud” track the at the start of Day 1. We have introductory presentations on both days; they ease the audience into the day and tell them what to expect from each track.

Miguel Carrasco delivers the welcome presentation to a packed room

Also presenting in the “Three Screens and the Cloud” track was Aaron Kowall:

Aaron Kowall makes a presentation

Both developer tracks were well attended. Here are some scenes from the other developer track, “Optimizing the Development Process”:

Packed presentation room

Packed presentation room

Day 2

We’ve always got extra goodies to give away at TechDays. This year’s bonus prize was a special Halo Reach edition of the Xbox 360, and Lowell Picklyk was the lucky winner. Here he is, being presented the prize by Barnaby Jeans:

Barnaby Jeans and Lowell Picklyk hold up the box for the limited edition "Halo Reach" Xbox 360

Here’s Anthony Vranic talking about some of the new goodies in ASP.NET 4 WebForms:

Anthony Vranic makes a presentation

And here are Aaron Kowall and Miguel Carrasco watching Anthony:

Aaron Kowall and Miguel Carrasco, seated and watching a presentation

In addition to the usual developer and IT pro tracks, we added a new track to TechDays: the Local Flavours track. Unlike the other tracks, whose content comes from other big Microsoft conferences such as TechEd North America, MIX and PDC, Local Flavours’ presentations are the creations of developers and IT pros in each city.

In Vancouver, the last Local Flavours session was a special treat: a recording of a DotNetRocks show with DotNetRocks stars Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin interviewing Pete LePage, Senior Product Manager for Internet Explorer. IE9 Beta had been released earlier that day, so it was the perfect time to interview him.

Here are Richard, Carl and Pete being introduced to the audience by John Bristowe:

Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin and Pete LePage seated as John Bristowe introduces them

Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin and Pete LePage seated as John Bristowe introduces them

Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin and Pete LePage seated as John Bristowe introduces them

Day 2 Evening

After the end of TechDays, we tore down the computer setups in the session rooms, “Ask the Experts” area and Collaboration Lounge and packed them for shipping to Edmonton, the next TechDays city (TechDays Edmonton takes place on October 5th and 6th).

The day wasn’t over yet: we changed out of our TechDays clothes, dressed up a little and made our way to Glowball Grill in Vancouver’s Yaletown district for an IE9 blogger night, where 604-area tech bloggers, tech press and other notable nerds were shown IE9 in action.

Here’s Arnaud Gabaudan, the consumer lead for Internet Explorer, welcoming the crowd:

Arnaud Gabaudan makes a quick speech to the attendees in the lounge area of Glowball Grill

John Bristowe waits “in the wings” to do his presentation after Arnaud’s introduction:

Arnaud Gabaudan makes a quick speech to the attendees in the lounge area of Glowball Grill as John Bristowe watches

And we’re off! Here’s John’s grand tour of the new, faster, more standards-compliant beta of IE9:

John Bristowe's presentation, as seen from the bar

And tucked off to the side were those of us in the bar. We still had a pretty good view of the presentation, plus we had easy access to drinks!

The scene at the bar

Don’t worry, John; I’m paying attention – I just pay better attention when I’m enjoying a Bloody Caesar:

John Bristowe's presentation, as seen from the bar

Day 3 (The Day After)

We held a Coffee and Code on the day after TechDays at the Take 5 Cafe at Granville and West Hastings, a stone’s throw from our hotel, and the site of the foundings of a couple of Vancouver tech groups and startups. I started Coffee and Code at the beginning of 2009 as a way for Microsoft to be better in touch with and more accessible to developers, it’s been going strong ever since.

The scene at Take 5 Cafe

The faces I know in the pictures above and below, from left to right:

  • Boris Mann (blue jacket)
  • Chris Nicol (red shirt)
  • Christian Beauclair (blue shirt)
  • Morten Rand-Hendriksen (green plaid shirt, far back)
  • John Bristowe (black t-shirt, seated farthest back)
  • Anthony Bartolo (rightmost blue shirt)
  • Mark Arteaga (rightmost in the white shirt)

The scene at Take 5 Cafe

We will be holding Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code events in all TechDays cities. Watch this blog for announcements about the locations of upcoming Coffee and Codes!

The scene at Take 5 Cafe

The scene at Take 5 Cafe

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from TechDays Vancouver, Part 4: Go DevMENTAL

Go DevMental: Our event for students

What is Go DevMENTAL?

Since TechDays – Microsoft Canada’s cross-country developer and IT pro conference visiting 8 cities across Canada this fall – is a two-day event, we’ve got the venues for the entire 48-hour period, including evenings. Rather than have the session rooms (which are already set up for an audience, complete with A/V and seating) lie fallow, we decided to put them to good use and hold free community events in the evenings. One of these events is Go DevMENTAL, where we show college and university students what they can build using Microsoft’s tools and technologies and give them a lot of free stuff.

Go DevMENTAL is a two-track conference, with one track devoted to web design and development using WebMatrix, Expression Blend and Silverlight, while the other covers mobile development for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight and XNA. At the end of the evening, we give the students a token for DreamSpark, our program that gives them free Microsoft development tools and operating systems and a DVD full of goodies so they can start coding right away.

If you’re a college or university student and would like to have an informative and entertaining evening where you learn cool new things, get free cool stuff, connect with industry people and get some help with your career, register for Go DevMental!

Where is Go DevMENTAL?

We’ll be hitting these cities on these dates:

City Where When
Edmonton Shaw Convention Centre October 5
Toronto Metro Toronto Convention Centre
South Building		 October 27
Halifax World Trade Centre November 2
Ottawa Hampton Inn Ottawa
(200 Coventry Road)		 November 9
Montreal Palais Des Congres November 23
Winnipeg Winnipeg Convention Centre December 7
Calgary Round-Up Centre
(Calgary Stampede Park)		 December 14

What Happened at Go DevMENTAL Vancouver?

Go DevMENTAL Vancouver took place on Tuesday, September 14th in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a gorgeous venue (for more, see this entry).

I was helping out with the Phone track, so I only managed to get photos for its sessions. My colleages in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe, took care of the Web track, while Mark Arteaga of Redbit Development and I ran the Phone track.

Here’s Mark setting up for his presentation, as the students and a number of professors milled into the room. We had some drinks and snacks set up in the back; that’s what the line at the back of the room is all about:

Photo of the session room, with Mark Arteaga setting up his computer in the foreground

And we’re off! Mark did the first presentation, which focused on app development with Silverlight.

The audience in the Phone track at Go DevMENTAL Vancouver

By the end of his session, he had a working, skinnable Magic 8-Ball app that responded to the user shaking the phone. The app was flexible enough so that it would be really easy to repurpose it as a fortune cookie app, the Wisdom of Master Yoda app and so on, without having to touch any code.

Mark Arteaga makes his presentation

Mark’s session was followed by a break, which concluded with a quick accordion performance by Yours Truly:

Joey deVilla plays accordion at Go DevMENTAL

Followed by a quick word from Andrew Gottlieb, a Microsoft recruiter who works the UBC campus looking for the next great Microsofties. If you’re looking for a job at Microsoft and you’re a student in the Vancouver area, you’re going to want to drop him a line.

Joey deVilla plays his accordion at Go DevMENTAL as Andrew Gottlieb stands beside him

Then came my presentation, a live-coding exercise in which we start with “File –> New Project…” and in 45 minutes, put together a game in which you get to smack Justin Bieber around. Let it never be said that I let professionalism stand in the way of a good coding presentation‘

Joey deVilla makes his presentation, holding up a piece of paper

Live coding in front of an audience is not for the weak of heart, and you’d better really know your stuff. But when you do it right, it’s fun for both you and the audience.

In these photos, I’m holding up two pieces of paper as a way of explaining collision detection using bounding boxes. It’s not every day you see some goof in an ironic hipster trucker cap talking about videogame fundamentals!

Joey deVilla makes his presentation at Go DevMENTAL holding up two pieces of paper

After the student sessions, I made my way to the faculty roundtable where we chatted with the professors about what Microsoft could do for them.

It was great meeting the students and faculty – I had a great time, and also learned a lot from them. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Go DevMENTAL cities. See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.