As Julie Lerman mentions on her blog, I will be speaking at the Vermont .NET User Group on April 11. My topic will be Test Driven Development, Unit Testing, and NUnit with an emphasis on practical demos of each of these methodologies and tools. I will also show some examples of Team System's new unit testing tools. I was also thinking...

I spoke at the November, 2004 meeting of the Connecticut .NET Users Group and at that time they were still piecing some things together after a restart of the group in October. Now, co-leaders SB Chatterjee and Carl Franklin (along with other volunteers) have put together a new look for the web site using the ever popular...

I was speaking on Security and .NET at the Rhode Island .NET Users Group (RI.NET) meeting tonight, but it has been cancelled because of an impending snowstorm to hit New England today, tonight, and tomorrow morning. The talk has been be rescheduled for March 10.

[Found via Johnathan Hardwick] I’ve set up a new community web site at http://nonadmin.editme.com. It’s a place where anyone can share their experiences with running as a non-administrator in Windows – the good (tips, tools, and help for using a limited-user account), the bad (programs that won’t even install, let alone run, unless...

[Found via Christa Carpentiere] Ken  - PSS escalation engineer for SQL Server and general SQL guru - has started blogging. You can check out his first post (on issues surrounding the use of lightweight pooling mode) at http://weblogs.asp.net/khen1234. If you do anything with SQL Server 2000 and don't know who Ken Henderson is, shame...

There are some interesting .NET events I am aware of this month in the Boston area: Downtown Boston Beantown.NET User Group, tonight, February 3, 5:30-7:30, featuring Sam Gentile on "Advanced COM Interop". Sam is giving a dry run of his VSLive talk. The Web Services Edge 2005 East Conference is taking place in downtown Boston on...

[Found via Ted Neward] Ward Cunningham's been busy over at his new digs. If you like Fowler, Hohpe/Woolf, Alur/Crupi/Malks, you owe it to yourself to have a look. Update: Harry Pierson has more information on this as well. I really like this PatternsShare wiki site! There are some patterns still missing, though, but it is a very good start...

[By way of Dana Epp] The Web Application Security Consortium has released a guest article written by Jeremiah Grossman (CTO of WhiteHat Security) on "The 80/20 Rule for Web Application Security: Increase your security without touching the source code". In this article Jeremiah discusses ways to make your website more difficult to exploit with...

(Paranoid) Mike Smith-Lonergan has a nice list of security tools he uses regularly. I use these quite often as well, but lately I have also been using packet monitoring tools to verify security at the socket level. Knowing the right tools to solve problems is sometimes more than half the battle.

Peter Provost picked up on my security note about Enterprise Library 2005 that you must install it to another location than Program Files for developing as a non-administrator (i.e. using a limited user account). He also mentioned that some of the NUnit tests will not work unless you are testing as an administrator. This is very...

As you may or may not have heard, the long awaited release of the Patterns and Practices Enterprise Library came out today. Go fetch! Security Note: If you are running and developing as a non-administrator (as you should be), you should install this to another folder other than the default location under Program Files. Otherwise, when...

Keith Pleas wrote an interesting article for MSDN: Guidance on Patterns & Practices: Security [by way of Julie Lerman] In the article, Keith talks about some of the things I have mentioned in my own blog before: There are too many samples out there with bad security practices that have become production code in one form or...

I noticed this last night and on Brad Abrams' blog. This looks to be really good (especially for CLR/Rotor enthusiasts like myself). I would love to go, but my plate is getting full with some new consulting work coming up (nice problem to have!). But, I already got my friend Ernie interested in going. This should be a great few days! [From...

We had a great first Boston Code Brew meeting with 15 people in attendance! Our primary topic was Security, and in particular, security issues that developers encounter every day. With pizza and sodas to start us off, we went around the table with everyone introducing themselves and talking a little about what they were looking to get...

In my .NET Rocks interview, I briefly alluded to Michael Howard's tool "DropMyRights" to help users who still run as Administrators (a practice I don't recommend, and neither does Howard, but I know many still do) to drop their privileges when using any tool to access the internet. Now, Howard has written an extension to...