DevIntersection - Day 4

It was another day filled with learning and sessions. We started the day talking about a topic that everyone needs to pay attention to, Security. Cyber security needs to be our number own priority and it can no longer be a perimeter security, we need to take security to the identity level. Almost all security breaches have come from credential leaks. There are so many tools that Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have created to help in the area of security. We should try to take advantage of what they have already built to help with our own security. We need to build security that both satisfies our IT departments, but also the customers/users. This may be hard at times, but is usually do-able. Microsoft has taken some great steps and is able to determine if you are able to paste from word into outlook based off the word document and the email address you will be sending from in outlook. If it is a work document in word, you will not be able to paste to a non-work email sending address. pretty neat stuff.

The next session I went to was called Application Debugging with IntelliTrace with John Guadagno. I will be honest, there weren't many notes that I took during this session. He did mention that his slides should be posted and that his speaker notes would be really helpful. Here are some notes that i did take. A few quick notes on IntelliTrace:

• Allows you to record events and method calls for your application. The black box for your application. See Key events and see what it is doing throughout the lifecycle. Will also keep values of variable and objects.
• Allows you to examine its state at different points in the execution.
• You don't have to have Visual Studio installed and can just have a collector on the machine to see what is going on

IntelliTrace can collect many different events. You can configure what to collect and save the environment to be used later or with certain projects. It can collect:

• Debugger Events - Value in local window, auto window, and data tips
• Exception - handled and unhandled
• .NET framework events
• Function name
• Values of primitive data types passed as parameters as function entry points and returned at function exit points
• Values of automatic properties when they are read or changed
• Pointers to first-level child objects, but not their values other than if they were null or not

The tool seemed to be really helpful if you don't have Visual Studio on a machine, but you need to see the steps that were taken to get a certain error. I could see this being useful when we have bugs on client computers but cannot reproduce the bug locally. Install the client and see the variables and steps that were taken on the clients computer. Now we just need the clients to allow us to install on their servers...

The next session I went to was Enabling DevOps in the Cloud with Steve Lange. It was great to see that most of what Steve talked about we already do at work. He mostly talked aboutt he tools that help get to DevOps, which were Microsoft tools as he works for Microsoft. He discussed using VSTS and all the tools available through VSTS. All of which we already use. I did learn about extension called the Test and Feedback extension that allows you to record the steps you take through a browser and enter a bug directly into VSTS. Pretty nice tool.

Steve also talked about Azure App Insights (can be used by non-Azure apps to get data and do analytics on the apps.

I then jumped around from The Intro to Xamarin and ASP.NET MVC - Development to Deployment. Neither one of these sessions provided any real new information. The Xamarin session was talking about how to load Xamarin onto the your computer, but wasn't about creating any apps.

I then went to ethe ASP .NET MVC class. This was maybe a mistake. I walked in and was a little lost on what her was talking about. there were pieces that I did know form working on our applications at work, but it seems I should have been in the session the entire time.

We finished the day with a key note on Angular 2. It was called Angular 2: Released, Greased, and Increased. This was a repeat of what I was told on Monday and Tuesday in the workshops. Really, the only new information was how come Google took the direction they did on Angular 2 and the performance benchmarks they used to increase the speed of Angular 2 (which is much faster then Angular 1)

Tomorrow is the last day. I hope the sessions are great and we get to end strong.