Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

Three months after the PDC conference and I’m finally catching up on the reading materials I collected in LA. One of the books I picked up was a copy of the Patterns and Practices Group’s A Guide to Claims Based Identity and Access Control. It turns out that this book just RTM’ed and is now available online in PDF and HTML formats.

This book is unique in the Microsoft world. You can find all kinds of books that scratch the surface of application and web service security. If you’re looking to dive deep and understand Claims-based identify and federated security, you were relegated to piecing bits of information from blogs, MSDN, and other sources – until this book arrived. The books takes a topic that is complex and difficult to comprehend and approaches it from the perspective of several personas: a security specialist, software architect, developer, and operations manager. While this is by no means an O’Reilly Heads-First style book, the persona approach, professional illustrations, simple metaphors, and meaningful examples go a long way towards making the material much more digestible.

I’m not well-versed in the nuances of NASCAR racing and don’t understand the spectacle very well so when I say this, please take it with a grain of salt. The whole Java versus .NET thing seems to me like a NASCAR race, one car edging ahead of the other and then again giving up ground to the competitor… on and on again for countless monotonous laps. I am in the process of re-immersing myself in the newer releases of Java. It has been years since I dealt with Java on a regular basis – the 1.1 through 1.4 days. This week, I had the chance to see a lightweight EJB 3 container in action, working through Oracle’s slick new IDE with integrated Java Server Faces (JSF) and Object Relational Mapping tool (Toplink, in this case) support. Suffice it to say that I was floored with the progress the Java community had made away from the monolithic J2EE / EJB 2.1 towards the lightweight model espoused by frameworks such as Spring. Just when it appeared that the Java car was pulling ahead ready to steal the race, along comes the announcement of the Community Technology Preview of ADO.NET vNext. NASCAR fans, we’ve got ourselves a race again. Below I offer a preview of some of the aforementioned technologies:

I received an email from one of my clients a couple of days back referring to a quote of mine on Cenqua’s website under their Clover.NET product. This brought me back to an article I wrote for Dr.Dobb’s Journal when build tools, unit testing products, and continuous integration were making their way from the Java world over to .NET. I decided to meander over to Dr.Dobb’s site (I still call it a site although a barrage of emails from CMP Media constantly reminds me that it’s a new and improved portal) and see if the article is still available.

Jacob Reimers’ Google Maps Control has been a genuine blessing for me over the last couple of days. After a lot of prototyping with Google and Yahoo maps, I decided to go with Google maps for GeoGlue and keep Yahoo maps open as an option based upon the development of the APIs as well as any potential licensing or usage constraints. After dealing with the Google APIs directly, and feeling the pain of issues such as the well-known Internet Explorer “Operation Aborted” maps loading issue, I was yearning for an intermediary API that had already thoughtfully addressed some of these issues.