A developer diary on implementing Windows Cardspace
Dominick Baier
Do you know Windows Cardspace? A new feature of .NET framework that allows authentication over the internet.
It is designed to be convenient and secure (avoiding phishing).
Nowadays authentication is application-centric. This means that which website has it’s own authentication system, stores information and the credentials of the users.
This design has some problems. People are registered in many sites. And they don’t want to memorize many passwords, so they tend to use the same password in almost all of them. If a hacker discovers one of them it can be a big big problem. By the other hand, many websites stores personal information, almost like a business card. But a year or so after the registration many informations can change (such as address, phone number and so on).
Windows Cardspace has a user-centric design. The information is stored in user’s computer. There is no need for a password. Windows Cardspace can also store information about the user (like a business card). When a user uses a card in a website, this website can refresh information about the user in their database.
This system can be used side-by-side with a old fashion way.
This system has a problem with mobility… To access websites from different computers you must backup a card into a disk or pen (protected by a password) an temporarily import it into the computer you want to use.
Alcides has told me about OpenID. I will have a look at it soon.
If you have Windows Vista try Windows Cardspace in SignOn.com
Women in Technology
Ani Babaian, Irene Pathy
During lunch time there was an great session with a panel of 4 women and an insider man 
This session was about the role of women in the technological world. They talked about topics like how to grow passion in technology among women, and how children should be taught that way.
Because women are so different from men, they must be reached in different ways. In USA, for example, there are some programs for young woman.
Another topic was the importance of women in developing teams. They’re important in these teams. Why? Because diversity is good to create new things. By the other hand, women generally have great communication and people management skills.
I know that they also talked about motherhood, but I had already left to the next session. There were too many overlaps in this day… But check out at Susana Vilaça. He was there during all session. She hasn’t posted about it yet, but I’m sure that she will soon.
Communities? Can They really help my business, my day-to-day job, and my career?
Bart Martens
This was a session lunch (AKA one of the sessions that prevents me from having lunch :-P)
The speaker talked about what was a community many centuries ago and now.
It started as a bunch of people with common interests but now is much more than that.
From the IT and Development point of view, communities are a support and experience sharing mean.
For companies like Microsoft, is a important source of feedback and influence on the market.
Many people consult communities blogs, wikis and forums before buy some equipment, for example.
I left at the middle of this session to attend to an simultaneous session.
Building Fun, Cool Applications with Popfly
Dan Fernandez
First time I tried Popfly I didn’t like it too much. But I gave it a change by learning more about it in this session.
There was a lot of people in this session, too much people actually. I had to attend to it in another room, with an bad streaming quality…
The main idea is to democratize development over the internet. Allow people with almost no programming experience to create rich content websites. Dan used a great analogy. The difference in the number of programming experts and people that doesn’t know how programming is like difference between the size of the Sun and the size of Saturn. Actually, after seeing his demonstration, I wasn’t convinced than Popfly is really a tool that can be used by every one… Is more like a toy for programmers
In his first demo he showed how to display a bunch of Flickr photos in a carousel and in a virtual book.
He showed how mashups (small visual) can be exported to Windows Vista Side Bar, Live Spaces, Facebook, or even to an simple HTML page. These mashups are actually Silverlight applications.
He also built an popularity comparer, that with two search terms creates a comparison graphic with the number of results in a search.
Dan also showed us how to create Building Blocks, which are the components which are combined to build mashups. It uses javascript to code behaviour and XML to store metadata like the kind of input/output that the block takes, and some suggestions about compatible blocks that can be combined with our costume one.
Pretty nice, hum?
In yesterday afternoon the MSPs from all over the world who came to this event hand a special dedicated set of sessions. These sessions helped us realizing how was the program outside Portugal.
There were some old Microsoft internees talking about their experience working in Microsoft.
In the end we had the change to ask everything we wanted to some top speakers of the event as David Plantt, Dan Fernandez and Rob Miles.
After these sessions it was bowling time! I sucked but it was fun. I had the change to meet MSPs from different countries.
Improvement in Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Compact Framework 3.5 for Windows Mobile developers
Andy Wigley
Not a great session. Compact Framework (CF) is a subset of .NET Framework for windows mobile devices.
It doesn’t have server technologies as ASP.NET and .NET Remoting. Doesn’t support Reflection. Some properties, events and methods were dropped from the original framework.
In about 10% of space of the original framework, it has about 30% of the functionality.
It has support for a subset of LINQ and WCF. The CF has now an audio API.
Visual Studio 2008 has support for Unit Testing, has a new version for the emulator (version 3.0) and supports Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK out of the box. VS 2008 has a Security Manager, which enables you to test your software in various possible security configurations in Windows Mobile.
