Teched 09: Day #3

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Just a short blog post for now about day 3 on TechEd in Berlin.
UPDATE: some more details on the sessions added!

Sessions from today:

Windows Identity Foundation Overview (Vittorio Bertocci)

Integrating application autorization with other platforms, Active Directory,… requires a lot of API’s.
Windows Identity Foundation (abbreviation WIF?) ables a developer to rely on another source for authentication.
This is called the identity provider, a Security Token Service (STS) in WIF.

If you have configured an STS, you can now add it to new or existing (ASP.NET) projects.
Therefore some ASP.NET controls are included.
WIF for Silverlight is not available (yet?).

Deep Dive in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 (Nuno Godinho)

  • The big challenge for WF 4.0: Business Analysts need to know what it is.
    Therefore Flow charts and unit testing was added.
    It is also possible to debug through the new flow charts.
  • Correlation is also added.
  • All workflows are stored in XAML.
  • The state machine was dropped and replaced by a flowchart.

Silverlight 3: what’s in it for developers? (Tim Heuer)

With the release of Silverlight 4 at PDC 09, the contents of this sessions are already outdated.
Silverlight developer Tim Heuer gives us a summary of new features in Silverlight 3.

  • Media enchangements: H.264 /AAC encoding.
  • GPU accelartion: you have to indicate this as a developer
  • Perspective 3D
  • Effects + Pixel shaders
  • Loacal messaging API: With this string based API, Silverlight API’s can talk to each other on the same page, on different browsers and different browser tabs.
    All you need are 2 classes: LocalMessageReceiver and LocalMessageSender.
  • Navigation
  • Reduced XAP size by taking assemblies and zip them up.

Securing Silverlight (Shwan Wildermuth)

In this interactive session Shwan Wildermuth discusses some security issues in Silverlight.
Because Silverlight 4 allows access to the public file system, some of these issues may be already outdated!
First, some threats are summarized:

  • Eavesdroppers (packet sniffers)
  • Hackers/Users (Reflector, Debuggers,…)
  • Neforious code

Silverlight is more secure than JavaScript, allthough it does not protect your data.
You can not store important data in the isolated storage, as these files are available for the user.

Data Driven ASP.NET Web Forms: Deep dive (Jeff King)

  • Today, databinding is always to objects.
    In this session Rich data models were introduced, using controls to present against a model.
  • The ASP.NET GridView now has EnablePersistedCollection as property to remember which row was previously selected.
  • Styles for sorting were added to the gridview.
  • If the data in the detailsview control were not valid before, you get the so called screen of death, displaying some ugly error message.
    Therefore you find on ASP.NET 4.0 GridView and DetailsView the EnableDynamicData() property.
  • DynamicData uses Field templates (i.e. for displaying Date/Time): haven’t we seen this on ASP.NET MVC too?
  • Dynamic datamananager: if you have a supplier id in your table, which has a relation to a supplier table, supplier names can be added in a dropdownlist, instead of chosing id’s.
  • You can also enable DynamicData support on a formview: this will result in generating dynamic controls for a whole formview, and also for page templates or even for a whole app this can be configured!
  • The QueryBlock Extender updates “where searching scenario’s” (similar than in RIA Services).
  • Jeff King also shows how in future releases of ASP.NET 4.0 a DomainDataSource will appear, where the business layer can be integrated more easily.

I ended the day at the Microsoft Belgium drink.
The atmosphere, the drinks and the people were just great!