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KolkataNET Sessions,ALT.NET & Tech Ed India 2009

Yesterday I came across Phil Haack's posts on ALT.NET Seattle Conference.I was really thrilled and sad as well.Thrilled to learn about such open space conference in .NET community and sad for not being able to part of one such meet.

KolkataNET Session - .NET Debugging and Profiling

This Saturday 28th Feb 2009 we had scheduled our session on .NET Debugging and Profiling.With this we have resumed our sessions for 2009 after a gap of almost 3 months.The turnaround of members was much much less than expected.We need to seriously think about this drop in number of participants in the sessions and come up with a resolution plan as fast as possible.This is not the topic of this post.Here I will summarize the references related to the various topics discussed in the session.Since this session was more of an informal discussion and demo without any slides I think these references will be useful.

Secure Coding Blog Carnival

Microsoft India has recently announced the Community Tech Days for developers in Kolkata on 28th March 2009.The focus of this Tech Days is going to be Secure Coding.Detailed session agenda includes

• Fundamentals of Security: 40 Minutes
  • Common attack patterns, data classification, and security data in storage/in transit
• Authentication: 40 Minutes
  • HTTP Basic/Digest/Kerberos, forms authentication, and .NET framework identities and principles
• Authorization: 40 minutes
  • Common authorization techniques, principles of least privilege net role based security, and code access security
• Input Handling: 120 Minutes
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS), persistent XSS, non-persistent XSS, SQL injection, one-click attacks, XML and XPATH injection, canonicalization issues, file upload/creation, and exception management
• Logging & Auditing: 20 minutes
• Q&A: 30 Minutes

For further details and registration link is available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/india/communitytechdays/

From KolkataNET community we are planning to the collate the views and thoughts of all active blogger's inside as well outside the group in form of blog carnival in the community site.The theme of course will be IT Security but not necessarily limited to Microsoft and related technology.The expected is to gather diverse viewpoints on the subject from the blogosphere on Security prior to this event.

Metrics - Let's Not Measure Blindly

This is my second post related to KolkataNET gathering we had last weekend.Every time we discuss about the success and growth of our community the number of registered users in the website and number of community sessions/discussions held comes up as a measure.For any community the number of members and knowledge sharing sessions held are very important figures.I fully agree to the fact that these are crucial.If they are abnormally low then it's a real concern and means that we are not growing as a community.But does a high value of these two figures truly indicate the growth and impact of the community?This question leads to another obvious and basic question "WHAT OUR COMMUNITY IS TRYING TO DO AND WHY WE ARE HERE"?

Today's Discussion On An "Expert"

Today WE,members of the KolkataNET(www.kolkatanet.com) met as part of general gathering.It was not any formal user group sessions but a rather informal meeting.Informal gatherings always form a great platform to share ideas and thoughts.In my opinion "Unconference" is always more effective than a Conference.