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• Live Mesh: ...because I can

  I am sure you already fell in love with Live Mesh : I know I did. Today I did a little experiment, which probably shows how desperately I need to go in vacation ASAP: I wanted to do a mega-remote session that would go through pretty much all the physical machines I am using there days. The sequence is as follows: laptop in the living room --> Media Center in the den -->laptop on my desk at work -->UMPC in the living room -->desktop at work Apart from the first leg, done via remote desktop, all the connections were done via live mesh. That's 5 PC deep: can you do better? I dare you, I'm sure there's people working on more PCs out there :-) Believe it or not, the last step in the chain (the tiny miniature of my desktop at work) was still fairly responsive! Picture follows: All those nested realities reminded of Hofstadter and his discussions about recursion in GEB : and pronto, here's there's the integrated cam in the UMPC put to good use for giving some recursive depth :-) Read More... Posted Friday, June 06, 2008 12:56 AM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Useless, Gadgets

• My new Fujitsu U810

  [warning: this post does not feature any identity related content, and it's probably useless] I feel for the UMPCs an unhealthy (walletwise) attraction, since the very moment they came out. In fact, if you dig in the early years of this blog you'll see I am a gadget freak: I am still proudly going around with my JasJar , even if it means having a fanny pack around my waist for the delight of my mocking colleagues (one day I'll give them proper grief about all the fashion mistakes they make according to Italian tastes, but that's another story :-)). During the black Friday I went, like many fellow geeks, in the annual pilgrimage to Fry's . Here, among unbelievably long lines and empty shelves, I saw the U810 : an exquisitely small convertible laptop, small enough to literally fit in the pockets of my jacket but with a keyboard big enough to support the parody of 3-fingers touchtyping I do. I have already seen it on engadget , but having it right there, with all the Vista icons so tiny in the 5.6" 1024x600 WSGA Crystal View... that day the line was too long, but the day after i just had to go buy it :) And here it is, shown together with my wife's 30" monitor: Tiny,eh? As soon as I got home I flattened the sad, sad Vista Basic that was on by default, for a more proper Vista Ultimate: promptly followed by Visual Studio 2008, Office, ArtRage , Live Writer , ZoomIt (especially zoomit, this thing is minuscule) Messenger, Paint.NET ... you get the picture. Below there's a screenshot Read More... Posted Wednesday, December 05, 2007 1:08 AM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Useless, Gadgets, Personal

• A (fiscal) year in review

  It's that time of the year again: the end of June marks the end of the fiscal year, and for us it's time to reflect on what we've done in the past 12 months. Vast majority of the things I've done are internal-only or with high profile customers that can't be mentioned publicly until their PR departments give the green light, hence I won't discuss those here; however I think it's interesting to share with you a summary of some of the things that I worked on, just to give you a measure of how .NET3.0 (especially CardSpace in my case) is relevant. It should give you an hint of how much impact you can have working in my group, so you'll be able to put announcements like this in the right perspective! I also hope that this will boost your confidence that the content of our upcoming book is based on very solid real world experience, earned by working daily with our key accounts in the identity space: the PG intent is tempered by immersing it in requirements from customer actually shipping solutions based on this thing that we call CardSpace. Which, by the way, is the reason for which I'm still at the computer at this time... big stuff is going on in cardspaceland! Projects, Briefings, Deep Dives This year I've worked with or briefed more than 45 enterprise companies on CardSpace/WCF/WF, good part of it at the very top of the fortune100 and global100 (ah, btw: just subscribed to Fortune. I was buying it all the times anyway). Sometimes it was just a 2 hours personalized QA, some other Read More... Posted Wednesday, June 27, 2007 3:49 AM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Identity, Windows Cardspace, CardSpace, Architecture - WS, Infocard, WPF, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, WCF, Gadgets, Personal, the Web, the Cloud, Orcas, RIA, Silverlight, Book, Silver, WF, Windows Workflow Foundation

• Securing a Sidebar Gadget with Windows CardSpace and WCF

  In short: I discuss Sidebar Gadgets, and I show you how to invoke a CardSpace-protected WCF service from a simple Gadget. Full source code is provided, along with detailed commentary on the road I've followed for getting there. Added bonus: the code shows how to apply an arbitrary configuration file to WCF, an issue often encountered when hosting WCF code in processes you don't control. Sidebar Gadgets are mini applications which live in the Sidebar, a UI element on the Windows Vista desktop. They are extremely handy for keeping an eye on information you are often interested to; they are also very good at providing you a quick-reach UI for tasks you perform often. As you know I wear the server guy hat, so I'm not really the best person for explaining the advanteges of Gadget: I would suggest visiting Michael and Jaime blogs if you want more details on the subject. When I thought of how the gadget model could be useful for me, I realized that much of the information I'd like to keep an eye on happens to be confidential (like being notified if I received a wire transfer, or getting the access statistics from my website); the actions I want to take when I react to changes in those data are also requiring high security levels (like accessing a portion of my home banking for giving approval for a certain utility bill to be paid). So, would not be great if we could use CardSpace for authenticating the services accessed by a Gadget? I thought for few nights about the issue, devised a Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 04, 2007 5:48 PM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Windows Cardspace, CardSpace, WCS, Sheer .NET, Windows Communication Foundation, WCF, Gadgets, the Web, the Cloud, RIA, Identity

• WCF on Windows Mobile

  Well, I guess a lot of people waited for this . Being able to write WS-* apps on phone? THIS IS GREAT!!!! Read More... Posted Tuesday, November 21, 2006 6:11 PM from Vibro.NET | 0 Comments Filed under: Architecture - WS, Windows Communication Foundation, Gadgets