DDDNorth2 - quick review
Saturday 13th October I attended the second DDDNorth. It
was held at Bradford University School of Management, the
first one was held at Sunderland University.
Myself and three friends who attend my local thai boxing gym and
who also happen to be IT geeks travelled across from Preston.
A few people had recommened the DDD events in the past but I had
never mangaged to get round to it. This year I did and I have to
say I was very impressed. The quality of the talks was of a
very high standard I learned quite a lot. I attended the
following sessions:
- Lions and tigers and hackers! Oh my! Phil Winstanley.
This session was a real eye opener into the world of hacking.
The main take away point was to read The Security Development
Lifecycle and incorparate into your development processes.
There is also the Microsoft website regarding security development
lifecycle see here
- Async C# 5.0 Liam Westley - This session was mostly based on
the Microsft white paper on async in C# 5.
- Defensive Programming 101 Nial Merrigan - This covered top 10
security issues that we have all been guilty of at some point.
The demo of how to download a web.config literally made my
jaw drop. In summary if you have web page that streams a file
e.g pdf files and you have url like
mystreampage.aspx?file=whaterver.pdf you can then fiddle with
the url and do mystreampage.aspx?file=..\web.config and with a
little bit of trial and error navigate to the root directory and
stream down the web.config
- Over lunch I sat through a couple of GROK talks - JMeter (load testing tool), Glimpse (effectively like
firebug for your server) and Out systems agile platform (the demo for this
looked to good to be true I need to investigate further but in
essence you model your business requirements and it spits out the
code).
- WebSockets and SignalR by Chirs Alcock - This was very
interesting deep dive into SignalR
- Event driven architectures by Ian Cooper - This was a very
advanced session and alot of it went over my head however it was
very well delivered and very interesting regarding SOA
patterns.
There was a session on Umbraco (Working effectively with Umbraco
- Andy Gibbon) which Tony Southworth attended.
Overall it was excellent, I even won something in the raffle at
the end, a license for some software but no idea what! I also
won a t shirt although had to give it away as it was XXL and I am
size S. As we left we were all given a 1 month free
subscription to Plural sight training website.
After the event myself and the rest of the Preston Thai boxing
massive went for an excellent meal at Mumtaz, Bradfords oldest and
by far best curry house.
All in all much fun and learning had by all.