As David Gristwood and Mike Shaw note, on October 4 in London there’s a free Microsoft Technical Briefing Day with sessions on IT security with Steve Ballmer presenting a keynote at the end of the day.  Rafal Lukawiecki, a security guru and one of the top-rated speakers from TechEd Amsterdam, will be presenting on Threat Modelling as well as XP SP 2.  There’s also a session that I’m particularly interested in on practical lessons learnt with WSE 2.0 on the UK Government Gateway project:

In February this year, a new release of the Government Gateway went live using WSE2.0 to deliver WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-Policy for UK cross-government authentication and authorisation. With over 4 million users, the Gateway's authentication and messaging facilities provide the backbone of the e-government agenda - and also one of the biggest WS-* implementations to date, coded in just 8 weeks. Find out the good, bad (and ugly) of using WS-Security - hot tips on what makes for good design, and what pitfalls to avoid.

You can register for the event here.

I’ve been head-down coding for several weeks (not quite to the ‘having other people feed me’ stage, but close).  I’m currently working on a VB.NET 2003 API for a large product and am missing refactoring tools.  To make up for it, I’ve been improving my regular expression skills and using Visual Studio's Search and Replace dialogue.  The VSEditor blog has a lot of good content on this feature (including a three part series).  The search and replace dialogues (both regular and the ‘in files’ versions) have a nice drop-down that displays the regular expression characters along with a description of what they do.

It’s a poor replacement for decent automated refactoring tools but it has made my life considerably easier over the last few weeks.