Visual Studio 2005 update

Just noticed that there will be Visual Studio 2005 RC1 released this month ahead of the final release in November.

I might be visiting Sydney late November, so I'll try and get along to the product launch if possible.

I passed the 70-305 exam at TechEd!

I attended TechEd on the Gold Coast last week, and took advantage of a free offer by Pearson VUE to take a free certification exam. I studied really hard (figuring that even if I failed, then at least I had experienced an exam without it costing me anything).

Well the study paid off, as I passed "Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET and Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET" with an excellent result - 962!

I'm going to see if I can have a go at 70-310 before the end of the year, and maybe complete the MCAD or MCSD next year.

Securing SQL 2000 with IPsec and Group Policy

Here are links to resources mentioned in my presentation to the Adelaide SQL Server User Group (18th August).

• IPsec overview
• Nmap - Free Stealth Port Scanner For Network Exploration & Security Audits. Runs on Linux/Windows/UNIX/Solaris/FreeBSD/OpenBSD
• WinPcap - The Windows packet capture library (used by Nmap)
• Windows Server 2003 Security Guide - Member server group policy and server roles including domain controllers, file, print and IIS servers.
• Threats and Countermeasures Guide - Chapter 11 contains IPsec tutorial.
• Sample netsh script to configure IPsec on Windows Server 2003