I am back from Portland now. Had a great trip! Wednesday night I got to attend a Portland Nerd Dinner and last night I was able to catch not only the ASP.NET Road show, but also a small pre-event gathering with Rob Howard. For an hour a small group of Portland and Boise influential types (according to Bliz) were given the opportunity to meet each other and throw some questions at Rob.
The group was not highly talkative so I ran with the opportunity to throw in my questions. First question related to preventing automated registrations, postings and the like for public web sites. Rob told us about some things he has been doing in the ASP.NET Forums to help prevent this. Currently there is no perfect way to stop automated attacks, but by limiting the number of posts from a given IP address and forcing people to go through a registration process where they respond to an Email can help. I hope to see more research and best practice suggestions in this area.
Of course I told Rob that the Rainbow Portal team is planning to do everything possible to make Rainbow the word on everyone’s mind right after Whidbey. Want to see Whidbey, look at Rainbow 2.0. So with that I asked what Rob might be able to do for us in terms of support similar to the assistance he provides DotNetNuke. He indicated that if I would send him an Email then he could set us up with the PDC alpha build of Whidbey and that he would work with us to find other methods of support. I was surprised to find that currently he has a conference call with Shaun Walker every week. That is privilege for Shaun that few get. I told him I did not want or have the time for a weekly call, but that I would certainly love to have some additional assistance from Microsoft as we move forward. Right now it all looks very promising. During Rob's ASP.NET Road show presentation he actually mentioned Rainbow with IBUYSPY when he was talking about some of the sample projects that are out there. Sorry DNN, it was our turn!
It was a pleasure to meet Joe Shook and John Deal at the roadshow as well. They were at the nerd dinner but we did not really get to meet there. These guys seemed to have a solid handle on dealing with web server and application security as well as ADSI. John was also very understanding of my feelings that any monkey can code, but that does not make them a developer. His blog is subtitled: Making the leap from Code Monkey to True Developer!