CardSpace

I was interested in both the Lua talk and this one; but I chose the CardSpace session since this is something that can potentially change the course of internet security & business.  Stuart Celarier did a presentation based on a proof of concept prototype that he did at Corillian.  Corillian, as some of you know it and as how I know it, is the company that Scott Hanselman works for =).  The presentation highlighted the challenges of providing a suitable and consistent environment for individuals to do business transactions.  Most of the discussed topics can be seen at Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog (take a look at the white paper).  Where it came alive for people was when they saw a demonstration of an existing ASP.NET 1.1 web app using a web service running on a recent version of .NET to handle the authorization process.  Unfortunately, there are still some drawbacks with CardSpace.  The biggest one is the fact that the identity selector requires .NET 3.0.  Stuart did point out that the good news is that .NET 3.0 is shipped with Vista. 

XNA

So yesterday, I was going to add a summary of the XNA talks.  The presentations by Charles Cox and Mitch Walker were fantastic.  They really showed how far Microsoft has come to lower the level of entry for game development.  The reason: a complete framework and tools provided (i.e. XACT - their audio creation tool) and uncomplicated pipeline for managing art/audio content.  To do these presentations justice, I would have to provide a screencast replay (Unfortunately, I don't have this and you can find a screencast online by Mitch anyways).  I would recommend anyone to check out the XNA site and dig into this.

RANDOM THOUGHTS OF THE DAY:

In an upcoming blog entry, I was thinking of a topic on ASPs (Application Service Providers) since that is a space I worked in.  A good example of an ASP is Salesforce.com.

Being new to the Seattle area, one of the first things I did when I got here was search around for development meetup/user groups.  I found the different user/meetup groups I attended to be enjoyable and wanted to continue on with that.  So for anyone else who is new to the Seattle area, here are some of the groups available.  I hope it may be of some assistance to others in this landscape:

USER GROUPS:

MS Technologies:

.NET Developers Association

South Sound .NET User Group

DotNetUsers

Others:

IEEE Computer Society Seattle

Seattle PHP Group

Seattle Perl User Group

Listed above were the ones I found most appealing.  You can find aggregate sites at: http://del.icio.us/yowhann/user_group. Please feel free to add to these.