Implementing STS for Infocards

I have been trying to use Infocards in my WinFX app and had some problems in using them. I was not able to import my self-created Infocards into my identity store. The problem was that when importing the infocard into the identity store, it was checking for the provider address where an STS(Security Token Service) needs to be running which was not the case in my system. Searching for a solution came across this STS implementation in Martin Gudgin's blog.

Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export Plug-In

Michael Swanson has created an Adobe Illustrator Plug-in that exports images to XAML for use in Avalon. With only a few minor color saturation issues, the plug-in is able to faithfully reproduce almost any image from Illustrator into XAML.

Michael Swanson has done a really amazing job. Actually I was searching for a way out to provide a dynamic UI builder for my WPF app and ended up in this plug-in. The plug-in gives out XAML syntax that is compatible with the February 2006 CTP and later (including Beta 2).

Read more about the plug-in here...

Download the plug-in here...

US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin for 2005

Happened to read the US-CERT cyber security bulletin summary. It reads...

"...The information is presented only as a index with links to the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin the information was published in. There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities..."

However, they have put a disclaimer stating that the results are an aggregation of reports from various sources.

TechEd 2006

I had the opportunity of attending the TechEd 2006 at Chennai. That was great rocking TechEd. However, when compared to the previous TechEds, I felt the liveliness was missing. More so, could be due to that instead of a live keynote session, this time they had a video played which didn't help to kick start the enthusiasm.

The Architect track sessions were more in a Business Process perspective, had little of technology. I request the oprganisers to please note that architects in India are techies who love to understand the new technologies and use them in their solutions. And due to this, the people who had registered for architect track, actually attended the developer track.

WinFX sessions where good. Mostly they were kind of introductory sessions rather than deep dives, except for the session on WCF by Gaurav Khanna. His session on CLR hosting was an eye-opener to understand the way CLR worked and how to extend the CLR capabilities in v2.0.

The security sessions by Vineet Gupta was very useful in the sense, developers got an idea of the things they could do out-of-the-box to aid security, showing security is not something outside the app, but something that runs through the app from the presentation layer to the DB.

For people who missed the TechEd 2006, you could get the presentations downloaded from http://www.techedindia.com

Vista is amazing!!!

For the past one week I am at Bangalore attending a training for Windows Vista.

We used to struggle to get a nice, jazzy UI for apps, which is far easy in WPF and I was amazed to look at getting all the UI gimmicks I would love to with just XAML... thanks to the declarative programming model introduced with WPF.

On WCF, exposing an app as a service is just for a few configurations and you are done... I have been working with SOA kind of appa for quite sometime, with WCF it is become so easy...

Thank you MS, for giving us such a nice technology.

Let's Rock the Community Launch!!!

The community launch of VS2005 is up at CNUG!!!

For more details check www.cnug.net. Registrations open at http://groups.msn.com/chennainetusergroup/communitylaunchsignup1.msnw

Awaiting to rock the community Launch!!!

Update: We had a Rocking Community launch with around 400 participants. Good thing was almost 80-85% of the crowd were developers.