The last day of DevWeek 2006 was probably my favourite. The day started off with an excellent keynote by Tim Ewald on the state of web services. The second session of the day was a bit disappointing - Understanding .NET Through Patterns by Paul Besly. I'm afraid his card trick analogies just didn't quite cut it and I'm pretty certain that many people with some familiarity with patterns went away feeling less than satisfied.

The first session of the afternoon was Extending ASP.NET 2.0 with Custom Providers by Jeff Prosise and as usual Jeff's excellent oratory skills held everyones attention. The last session of the day was Inside the ASP.NET 2.0 Compilation Model by Dino Esposito. This session was a pretty indepth look at the new compilation model and how to extend it using custom build providers - 10/10.

This was my second DevWeek and again it was a very worthwhile conference with great speakers, great topics and quite informal and friendly.

This week I'm down at DevWeek 2006 which I also attended last year. It's quite good value for money and the quality of the speakers and topics is good again this year. The sessions I've attended so far are:

Tuesday:

Keynote - Dave Wheeler
Power ASP.NET 2.0 Programming - Jeff Prosise
Exploring Unit Testing with Visual Studio Team System - Kevin Jones
Writing Extensible Applications Using Reflection - Jason Clark

Wednesday:

Understanding Threads and Thread Synchronisation - Jason Clark
Distributed .NET - Ted Neward
Extending System.Xml - Ted Neward
ASP.NET, AJAX, and you: Introducing MS AJAX - Jeff Prosise

It's nice to know from sessions such as the Jason Clark ones that I'm doing all the right things :-)

More later.

Scott Guthrie announced the release of the second preview of the Web Application Project type for VS05. You can read about it here and download it from here.

If you're developing Visual Studio 2005 ASP.NET 2.0 websites on Windows 2003 server and you're creating a separate IIS website for each project then there's a new gotcha I discovered today.

I prefer developing on Windows 2003 because at the very least you can organise your web projects more sensibly (and sanely) rather than lumping everything into the Default website. There are also many projects we undertake where we need the whole of an existing site on the dev box when we're adding new functionality - often we find absolute urls to scripts or images and unless the darned code gets to live in its own website it can be a bugger to work with.

I know there's a hack to coerce IIS on XP to have more than one Website but it's inconvenient especially when you need to switch between projects quickly (a current project is having a bunch of new functionality added to two sites which will be shared) and lets face it, it's a dirty hack.

Anyway if you start debugging a VS05 website created under IIS (you really shouldn't use the cassini based thing for anything other than knocking up quicky snippets of code, see: Cassini considered harmful (leastprivilege.com) and you encounter the error: "Unable to start debugging on the web server. Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password" then check out this kb article -

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6.

You also need to start the Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor and make sure your logon is added to the Permissions for Remote Debugging under Tools->Permissions. This seems to be a new thing because VS02/03 worked just fine without it in the past. Now please can I have the last 4 hours of my life back?

Update:

I forgot to add that the following event is logged when the vs 2005 login failure occurs -

Event Type: Failure Audit
Event Source: Security
Event Category: Logon/Logoff
Event ID: 537
Date:  10/02/2006
Time:  01:40:21
User:  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: UKM-W2K3-003
Description:
Logon Failure:
  Reason:  An error occurred during logon
  User Name: Kevin
  Domain:  MYSERVER
  Logon Type: 3
  Logon Process: O­
  Authentication Package: NTLM
  Workstation Name: MYSERVER  
  Status code: 0xC000006D
  Substatus code: 0x0
  Caller User Name: -
  Caller Domain: -
  Caller Logon ID: -
  Caller Process ID: -
  Transited Services: -
  Source Network Address: 192.168.100.59
  Source Port: 0

This is a hilarious take on the meaningless hyperbole that is 'Web 2.0' - BileBlog - Web TwoPointSchmoe

I couldn't agree more with his closing paragraph -

"There's no doubt that ajax, tagging, semantic fappery and all that other gibberish have some potential. Ultimately though, there is no revolution, nor even an evolution. It's simply the ability to toss in a few more tools in the toolbox. Specialised tools, that can be effective when used against the right obstacle. Nothing more, nothing less."