Reverse Engineering and Creating Great Installers
This past week has been yet another busy one. On Saturday November 17th I had the honor of presenting my Reverse Engineering .NET and Java talk at 1DevDay Detroit. The conference was an outstanding event. It was held at the Cobo Center and was very well organized. There was a great selection of topics and lots of top presenters. I saw a very interesting presentation on how to use the CUDA to solve computationally intense problems by taking advantage of GPU processors. After a tasty lunch I sat in a very active open space discussion of functional versus object orientated programming techniques that evolved into a discussion of how to pick the right technology stack for the right job. I wasn’t able to stay for the afternoon sessions or for the closing event due to family commitments but it looks like there was lots of excitement throughout the day. My slides from the talk are up on SpeakerDeck. I hope to be able to return to the Detroit area in the future, the Michigan tech scene is definitely very active.
On November 20 I gave my Creating Great Installers presentation to the Cleveland WPF User Group. We had a great time going over how the WiX toolset works and all of the libraries that are available to help with complex installation tasks such as XML file manipulation, installing services and configuring IIS. Not everyone needs to use an MSI installer but when you do need one WiX is a powerful tool that will make it much easier. You can get my slides from Speakerdeck and download the code that I used from my BitBucket repository.
For my last presentation of the year I will be giving my Application Security talk on December 8 at the Central Ohio Day of .NET. Tickets are going fast so make sure you get yours today. I hope to see you there!
Finally, since my speaking schedule has slowed down I am going to be working on the application to run the CodeMash Door Decorating Competition. I am excited that the CodeMash community can finally show up those cheerleaders and prove that we can decorate our hotel room doors even better than they can. If you are going to attend CodeMash (at any of the hotels) feel free to participate by decorating your door. Even if you are not able to attend CodeMash I am opening the competition up to the entire world. During CodeMash decorate any door that you happen to have handy, send a picture to me and I will make sure it is included in the competition. I would also like to thank some vendors who have stepped up and voluntarily contributed prizes for this competition. Thanks to Emily Schweiss for the mysteriously wrapped package that seems to contain a bottle of liquid. I’m not quite sure what it is but you definitely need to be over 21 to win this prize. Also thanks to Telerik and Gibraltar Software for contributing prizes to the competition. This is going to be fun! Watch this spot for further announcements as I flesh out the details of the web application that people will use to vote on their favorite doors.
As I noted in my earlier blog post this is not an official CodeMash function, it is something I am running on my own. I am very grateful that the CodeMash organizers are so cool and accepting of the idea.
Between the holidays, work and my new spare time project of building the door decorating competition website it is going to be a busy time until CodeMash. I hope to see you around at events in the community and I am looking forward to even more fun times in 2013!