Today I spent most of the day in the CardSpace booth. I didn't get to attend any sessions. I did get to talk to a lot of nice people about Windows CardSpace. There were a few others who saw the .NET Framework logo at the top of the booth and asked other framework related questions. I am sorry I couldn't answer them all. Hopefully everyone found an answer to the question.

I am afraid I will be in the booth the rest of the week so unless something big happens I probably won't post anything new on TechEd specifically.

Apologies for not posting this last night but when I got back to the hotel there was something wrong with the Internet connection to the outside world. I just blamed it on the lightning show going on outside and went to bed.

I enjoyed the first day of TechEd. The keynote was Bill Gates' last one (or so we have been told) and it was a fairly typical keynote. My biggest complaint is that I wish they would stop showing off database refactoring. In the real world when you rename a column in a database and are not using stored procedures as an abstraction layer (as this application was not) then a lot of other applications suddenly break.

I did a little bit of booth duty and then was privileged to have lunch along with 14 others with S. Somasegar and Bill Gates. We had a Q&A session where Bill answered a lot of questions about what he is going to be doing and how he feels that his foundation and technology can help make a difference in the world. It was clear that he had researched the issues and understood where he could make a difference and where corruption or bureaucracy would limit the effectiveness of his work. After the event some of us were talking about how inspiring the talk was.

In the afternoon I gave my talk on what is new in Windows CardSpace in the .NET Framework v3.5. If you missed it the streaming version should be available by tomorrow. I enjoyed the session and especially the questions that came at the end.

With TechEd 2008 Developer happening next week in Orlando it might be too late for you to set up your travel and arrange your work schedule to go but never fear, Microsoft has a different conference you might be interested in. The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is comming to Los Angeles in October 27-30th. You can register at http://www.microsoftpdc.com. I have been involved with some of the planning for the event (a small part to be sure) and I am really excitied about some of the things that will be talked about. PDC is where Microsoft talks about products that will be coming out in the next few years to help us understand their roadmap and what to expect.

I am sure that some of the sessions will cover the hot topics in the industry including:

• The Live developer platform
• "Cloud" computing
• "Oslo" and what it means to developers
• The next generation of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework

I also wouldn't be surprised to see things like Windows "7" and other future products/technologies talked about.

I plan on attending and hope to see you there as well.

I just wanted to post the files that I used when doing the demonstrations in my Office session for last week's launch event in Salt Lake City. These are the completed demonstrations that show the services that Rob wrote, using Word, Outlook, and ASP.NET to consume those services, and to update the data in the office applications.

I got this from an issue of the RISKS digest. The real problem is that we don't know what OS is used when we purchase a certificate. It might be a good idea to contact the vendors you have purchased certificates from and make sure that you are not affected by this.

DSA-1571-1 openssl -- predictable random number generator Date Reported: 13 May 2008 Affected Packages: openssl

Vulnerable: Yes

Security database references: In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2008-0166.

More information:

Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.

This is a Debian-specific vulnerability which does not affect other operating systems which are not based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.

It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian systems is recreated from scratch. Furthermore, all DSA keys ever used on affected Debian systems for signing or authentication purposes should be considered compromised; the Digital Signature Algorithm relies on a secret random value used during signature generation. ...

http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571

I want to remind everyone about the Utah County .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday. Here is the text from the reminder e-mail I sent out:

Join us on Wednesday, May 21 at 6:00 for our monthly meeting. As always we will meet at the NuSkin NOC located at 1175 S 350 E, Provo.

Jonathan Turner will be speaking to us on Silverlight. The presentation will focus on Silverlight 2 and will cover the following topics (based on time and interest)
- The differences between the different Silverlight versions
- What you need to develop Silverlight applications
- What your users need to use your Silverlight applications
- Creating a simple Silverlight application that includes the following
   - Some of the built in controls
   - Custom handled user interaction (mouse/keyboard input)
   - Simple animation
   - Simple multimedia (sound/video)

Jonathan received a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science from BYU. His thesis involved integrating machine learning into user interfaces for controlling robots. He has worked for Aradyme Corp. as a software engineer doing data conversion, for Neumont University as an instructor, and currently works for Caselle Inc. as a senior software developer.

This is a little off of the typical content for my blog but when I saw this I thought I just have to share (and besides its Friday so you deserve a little break). I got an e-mail asking me to take a survey. It was a web based survey from a company I know so I decided to try it out. Almost all the questions were the typical questions with answers on a scale of 1-7 with 1 being the dislike/no answer and 7 being the like/yes answer. Then I got to a question with this for the possible answers.

I sat there for a minute analyzing the numbering scheme. I tried to find a pattern like 1 in the middle with the numbers concentrically arranged around it. I also looked at an odd/even distribution. It isn't like they just reversed the numbers and the questions above and below it were in the correct 1-7 order. Finally I decided that it was taking too much of my time and I should just skip the question. Unfortunately all of the questions required an answer. Normally I would have just closed the browser window and decided that they weren't worth the time but this time I decided that a little random data might give them something to think about and just chose the 1 button. I don't know if I was indicating I wanted them to do it for me, I was ambivalent about the whole thing, or that I want to do it myself but it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they start asking about the results and why this one question seems to be outside of the expected values. I am sure there will be some finger pointing and questioning of the database or the web programmers. I am truly sorry for any grief I might cause those people. In the end I think they will have to throw the question out or get some high priced behavioral analyst to decide if I noticed the changed number scheme and clicked on the number I wanted or if I just blindly clicked the position I expected my number to be in. That would be some feat of mind reading.

Sometime over the weekend the home page for Live Search at http://www.live.com has been updated. It is a lot cleaner and loads a lot faster. I have only done a few searches with the new page and don't have any feel for changes to the search results. I like the new clean interface but to be honest what I really want are good search results. If I just wanted a pretty interface on the search page I could go to http://www.msdewey.com or http://www.tafiti.com to get a pretty interface on the search engine.

According to ComputerWorld IE gained a small market share in April. It is the first gain for IE since October and comes after Apple attempted to push Safari out via automatic updates. I didn't do that well in statistics but the numbers seemed relatively small and might just reflect that there is some settling in the marketplace as people pick their favorite browser and use it. The article points out that IE6 gained in popularity. That tells me it wasn't a whole slew of new Windows Vista machines. I am hoping it wasn't a lot of people who gave up on Vista and went back to XP but that is certainly also a possibility. If that were the case I would expect the numbers to change as those people download IE7, Safari, or FireFox to their XP machines.

Of course as we all know and are reminded of almost every time we watch the news, statistics can be made to tell almost any story that we want.

I just saw that Microsoft is not going to sweeten the deal for Yahoo! any more than it has and has decided against a hostile takeover. I am not sure what Microsoft would have expected to gain but with all the moves that Yahoo! has made lateley to make sure that it is an unattractive takeover target I guess it is the best for Microsoft. When they start talking companies of that size and the different cultures there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. I am sure I am not aware of even a small part of them so my opinion probably doesn't count for anything. I guess that is why Steve Balmer and Jerry Yang get the compensation packages that they do and why I am nowhere close to getting paid as much.

The article did say that if Yahoo! didn't show stronger performance they might be a target for a takeover bid. I am sure at that point Microsoft will take another look at whatever they thought was attractive about Yahoo! and decide whether to make another bid.