[I suggest my usual readers to skip this post altogether, you won't find anything useful here :-)] Romeo tagged me with this "How did you get started in software development?" quest. I was already feeling guilty, because given how swamped I am I knew I was not going to have time to reply to the tag: OTOH right now my main PC is unusable, since I am repaving a new HD on it, hence while the network install goes I can write this up. How old were you when you started programming? A quale età hai cominciato

It's since April that I don't write about the book (at the time we released the entire Chapter 2 on MSDN ). Last week I received notice that 2 new reviews were published: one is from the Denver Visual Studio User Group , the other is on Paul Van Brenk's blog . Both reviews are extremely nice, for which we are very grateful; I especially like the fact that in both cases the reviewers perceived our intention to deal with the problem from an holistic point of view, regardless of our affiliation with

2:35AM. I landed few hours ago in Seattle, back from a successful week in Kuala Lumpur & Singapore , and of course I am totally jetlagged and I can't sleep at all. Hence I'll kill some time writing the customarily post I do every April for this feed's birthday (former installments: 2004 , 2005 , 2006 , 2007 ). Five years is quite a long time in the IT timescale. It always amazes me to see the readership stats: given the specificity of the topics I write about, coupled with my regrettable tendency

Before presenting in a country I never visited I always try to read about the local culture and understand the basic do's and don'ts. Besides being IMHO a basic form of respect for your hosts, this helps you avoiding VERY embarrassing situations that you'd never ever figure out on your own. If you ever followed one of my presentations, you know that my "Identity Metasystem in a nutshell" pitch is a slide describing the msdn faceless guy having his age checked in order to get some wine. This example

Well, I really really enjoyed going to RSA. As I foresaw, more than the event itself I really appreciated the chance of meeting with very smart people: the Concordia and the OSIS events were truly exceptional in this sense. Axel captured some of that spirit here . Just to mention a few notable encounters: I spent some quality time with Pat Patterson , mainly discussing the book. I really really appreciated his honesty and his feedback, he truly read the book with attention and his remarks were always

After a remarkably quiet flight I landed in S.Francisco: the city of the Golden Gate , the Italian consulate and the theater of this year's RSA conference . I just unloaded on the bed all the swag from the conference bag (very original BTW, love the Turing theme ), and I was going through my agenda so far: believe it or not, Caleb and I actually have a book signing session (for the listeners tuning in just now, this is the book ). I already felt it a bit surreal, but when I saw our names adjacent

I am delighted to announce a slight change in my role: from now on I'll focus on identity architecture, especially in the context of S+S and cloud services. YEEEEEES!!! If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have gotten the impression it was already the case. Actually, for the last three years I worked with enterprise early adopters and connected systems (WCF, WF, CardSpace). If you ever read a case study on those, chances are I may have worked on the project in some form: I had the chance

It's that time again. Few months ago the Italian government fell, and as a good citizen I am called to the right-duty of casting my vote for electing the new one. There's a little detail, though: while in the past that meant taking a short walk through my scenic little home town and meet few old friends at the voting office, the fact that I am now a resident of the Washington state in USA makes the walk a little too long. Luckily, technology comes to the rescue: I can cast my vote via mail :-). Since

Jon Udell recently launched a new interesting format on the website perspectives.on10.net. Perspectives is a series of in-depth conversations with passionate innovators. Most work for Microsoft; some work elsewhere; all are advancing the state of the art in areas as diverse as robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. Information technology is the common thread, and Perspectives appeals to the technically-minded, but the show also aims to tell stories in ways that make sense to

Well, don't get fooled. I'm not going to make any big philosophical considerations about technology and privacy (though I may do that in the future), but I will talk about the little project I've put together after three gintonics & the MIX party at TAO . I am often on the road. When I am homesick I often open a terminal server session with one of my home machines and fire up the webcam; sometime I am in dramatically different timezones, so it's nice seeing that where I am it is dark but back