OpenID: Distributed Identity Systems

I love the idea of having a distributed identity system. Check out OpenID's site. I love the attitude they have towards nobody owning or licensing or requiring money, etc. to make this work.

Internet Explorer 7 Released

The long awaited IE7 is here. I know I'm a few days behind but download it and check it out. I've been running the Release Candidate 1 for a few months and am getting used to it. I especially like opening new windows with the mouse wheel and closing windows with the same. The new RSS platform is really exciting for developers as well as users. I'm hoping I can tap into this technology soon for my web site users at work.

Federated Identity Authentication with ADFS

That just sounds cool... But it appears that it might work really cool too! Take a look at Keith Brown's article Single Sign-On -- A Developer's Introduction To Active Directory Federation Services. This is more of a business to business idea but I think it could work internal to a company as well. I'm always looking for ways to leverage single sign-on capabilities. Everyone hates typing their password in 20 times a day which is about how often I do. I'm glad people continue to innovate in this area.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is one of Google's latest beta web apps. Great tool with a friendly user interface. If you're already a Gmail user, you've already got the account for Google calendar. There is no need to create a separate account.

I've used it for about five days now and am impressed with how easy it is to use and share with others. My wife and I can share our calendars with each other and not have "remember" to tell each other what is going on in our lives. I can also check from work what is going on socially without having to keep two calendars or call home to find out if there is a conflict. It's great!

But wait... there's more. If you use an RSS feed reader (aggregator) you can subscribe to a feed of your own calendar or someone elses one of two different formats. Both are published standards One is RSS and the other is iCAL.

Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)

Get in on all the excitement of Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). An article on MSDN describes Ajax.NET, a framework on top of the framework that allows you to update items on a browser window without posting back to the server.

To date there are a few articles of note that I have read and recommend for further understanding of this new use of technologies:

• ASP.NET Spiced: AJAX by Karl Seguin published Sep 2005
• The above article points you to Michael Schwarz's Ajax.NET Professional download and samples page.
• Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications - The man who coined the Ajax phrase or acronym, Jesse James Garrett, from Adaptive Path writes a very thoughtful and well thought out article describing the basics. Feb 2005

Some famous applications using Ajax technologies are Google Maps (drag and zoom without refreshing the entire page), Google's Blogger front page with a scrolling marquee

.NET 2.0 Released Yesterday!!!

I just downloaded the .NET 2.0 Framework Redistributable Package an hour ago. How exciting! I've been waiting almost a year for this. No more betas... no more waiting! Here we come sitemaps, GridView and providers and more Oh My! I'll keep ya posted on what I'm learning! By the way providers are so great! Don't leave your mid-size+ app home without them!