Thomas Williams

Review: Microsoft Security Summit, Melbourne (Part 1)

Yesterday (Tuesday February 22nd) I attended the Microsoft Security Summit at the Melbourne Exhibition & Convention Centre. It was an all day event, starting with the keynote at 8:30AM (which started at more like 8:50 due to the number of people registering) and ending when Greg Low let out his "class" at 5:30PM.

The keynote was delivered by the former head of Microsoft Consulting Services and current Microsoft Vice President Bob McDowell. Bob was a really interesting speaker, who had a lot to say on how IT can deliver value to business (in keeping with his latest book "In Search of Business Value"). I feel that this question - how do my efforts translate into business value for the hospital I work in - has bugged me for a while, and it was refreshing to hear it discussed openly by this professional guy who's obviously given it a lot of thought. He tied in the concept of security as being critical to business operations and IT, and he also had lots of interesting stories and anecdotes about life within Microsoft (a company that has a "vice president of mice" for the MS mouse and that makes $125 million in one weekend off the release of the game "Halo 2", yet whose biggest contract is with the US Army for $700 million).

After that I followed about a third of the people upstairs for the MSDN Track "Visual Studio Team System Overview", presented by Melbourne's own Jason McConnell. Jason's session  focused on a new addition to the upper-end product line of Visual Studio, which meant that from the outset I filed his presentation in the "interesting, but not essential" basket as I work with VS 2003 Standard Edition in a very small team, and I don't think Team System will make it into the lower-end products of Visual Studio 2005. Jason discussed VS 2005 beta software and his presentation was good, but it had a lot of slides (30+), some with paragraphs and paragraphs of text which made it hard to take it all in, but he did however do 2 or 3 demos which covered the written material anyway.

We then had a break for morning tea and a chance to check out the exhibition hall. I also wandered over to the "MSDN Connection Lounge" which I had assumed would be totally bogus as membership is free, but which turned out to be an under-utilised (by the masses) and fairly quiet spot away from the crowds. There I got to meet some other developers and IT guys and catch up with the one or two people that I already know from the SQL Server SIG. Microsoft also put on coffee, food and drinks for each meal break, which is a big effort considering the number of people that attended!

Following morning tea was the MSDN session "Tools for Quality Code" with Darryl Chantry of Microsoft and Sean Salisbury of Compuware. Darryl started with the new tools shipping with VS 2005 to perform unit tests and execute FxCop rules (and other things) to get better quality code, but it was Sean's demonstration of some of the Compuware products like FaultSimulator and SecurityChecker that impressed me. FaultSimulator allows you to simulate any kind of error, like disk full, low memory or loss of network connection both inside the debugger and on a compiled application without changing your code and without affecting the operating system. SecurityChecker checks your ASP.NET application for possible attack angles and gives you details, back to the line of code, on how you can fix them.

I met up with my boss at lunch and also chatted to Tejas and his mate Nirav (who doesn't have a blog). I didn't go to a session directly after lunch but instead allowed time to really check out the exhibition hall again (and enter all the free competitions from the vendors).

Stay tuned for Part 2...