TechEd North America 2011

TechEd this year was great!  The sessions that I attended were all very worthwhile.  The ones that I missed, I'll catch on Channel 9.  I was able to volunteer for a few things this year as well.  Volunteering at the event is definitely worthwhile because you can help out, and it puts you in a position to network with many more people outside of your normal track at the conference.

One of my very good friends, Adam Tuliper, presented this year at TechEd.  He did a great job, and his presentation is one that every developer should view and learn from.  It covered a topic that most developers (and sadly, me too) overlook or put off until the "functionality" of the project is completed.  The presentation is on "hack proofing" your ASP.NET web forms and MVC websites.  You can watch the recording here:  http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DEV333.  Like I said, you definitely will learn a lot about security. 

If you get the chance to see Adam present at a CodeCamp or User Group in your area, it is definitely worth the price of admission.  :)

Tim

Isolated Storage development in Windows Phone

Tonight I was racking my brain trying to get a json serialized file from the isolated storage of the emulator while I was debugging.  This tool is a god send and will help you to inspect the files that you create in the isolated storage of your development environment, it is named:  Windows Phone 7 Isolated Storage Explorer.  It can be found here:  http://wp7explorer.codeplex.com/.  There were a few quirky things, but it did exactly what I needed which was to let me inspect the files that I put into the isolated storage area.  I hope this post helps someone save some time.

For those that are interested...

I retrieved several DataServiceCollections from an odata feed, converted them to an ObservableCollection and then serialized it out to the Isolated Storage using the
DataContractJsonSerializer  and the IsolatedStorageFileStream.  This was all so that I could include this data with my application as a resource.  This was necessary since the odata service is not guaranteed to stay up much longer, and the data is not going to change.

But, with the help of the WP7Explorer, I was able to get the json serialized files and now I can include them with my application, and within the App.xaml I can put these files to the Isolated Storage the first time my application starts up.

Tim