The SQL Server Modeling team has released an update of the November CTP that works with Visual Studio 2010 RC. Kraig Brockschmidt made the announcement in the MSDN Forums earlier today.

As I reported earlier, the Visual Studio 2010 release candidate (RC) was not compatible with various other prerelease bits. That’s a good thing: trying to get all of the different teams to deliver prerelease software in lock step would slow down the development process down with little commensurate value. In other words, it is a small and reasonable price to pay for working with the technologies before they are completed.

According to Chris Sells, the new SQL Server Modeling November 2009 CTP Release 2 only updates the original November 2009 CTP so that it works with Visual Studio 2010 RC and .NET Framework 4 RC. It does not fix anything else or deliver any new functionality.

The recommended sequence, described by Kraig, is to uninstall the previous Modeling CTP, uninstall VS 2010 Beta 2, then install VS 2010 RC, then install the new Modeling CTP Release 2. If you’ve already embarked on some other path, see Kraig’s notes for details on getting order restored to the universe.

If you’re in the greater San Francisco Bay area, come out and hear me talk on Modeling with SQL Server Modeling Services (née “Oslo”) on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at the Bay.NET User Group which meets on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. Social networking starts at 6:00 PM, and my presentation is at 6:30 PM. This is a free event, but registration is required.

First, please don’t get thrown by the SQL Server part of SQL Server Modeling Services. This modeling technology is for developers, architects, database developers and, in the fullness of time, most aspects of the application lifecycle management.

I will explain what’s in the November 2009 CTP of SQL Server Modeling Services, where the technology is going, and why you should be interested in it today. I’ll demonstrate the “M” modeling language using the new Intellipad editor, and graphical modeling in “Quadrant”. Bring your questions, and I will see you there.

I entered a contest for haiku about the release of Window Server 2008 R2 in November. Today I was informed that I am one of nine finalists. I have passed the judges’ round. Now it is time for the voting Internet public to select the winner. With your vote, I could be that winner! Needless to say, that would be awesome!

If you are reading this, you are a denizen of the Internet, and that more than qualifies you to vote me the winner. It’s easy, just go to https://www.r2haiku.com/Haikus/Finalists and click the Vote button on the haiku by poet “vstuart”.

When you vote, you’ll need to provide your identity (so they know you aren’t voting twice) using a Twitter account or Live ID account.

Check this out. If you use your Twitter account, your browser is redirected to Twitter (you can verify that by the URL in the address bar) which asks if you want to allow or deny Twitter to vouch for your identity. This is federated security: you are not creating a new identity for the contest site, and you are not providing your Twitter credentials to any site other than Twitter. More of the online world needs to use federated security.

The contest prize is a really nice home entertainment center. If I win, you’re all invited over for movie night at my house. Seriously. I am taking nominations of what movies we should watch.

How about the haiku? Here’s my entry.

Managed code on Core
My web server takes a step
A small footprint remains

Some of my not-so-technical friends have asked for an explanation. Windows Server 2008 comes in multiple editions, each one suitable for specific uses. Windows Server Core is an edition that has the absolute bare bones of a server operating system: no bells and whistles. In the original release of Windows Server 2008, the Core edition did not have the ability to run software built on the .NET Framework: .NET-based software is also known as managed code. The second release of Windows Server 2008, called R2, extends the Core edition so that it can run managed code. That means that Windows Server 2008 R2 Core is an excellent choice for hosting software such as web applications built on ASP.NET or Silverlight. Over the first release of Windows Server Core, that is a real step forward. The amount of memory and other resources used by an application or a machine are referred to as it’s footprint. Being able to host web applications with a no-frills Core operating system means that the web servers used for these kinds of application are much smaller, easier to maintain, and have a smaller “attack surface”. That, in turn, means that if the web server is a virtual machine, you can get more virtual web servers on a single physical server, resulting in more users getting served on the same physical hardware. That saves time and money.

A few words on haiku are also in order. My dad loved Japanese culture, including the poetry forms of haiku and renga. In high school and college I took up an interest in Japanese poetry as well. I still have my father’s copy of Buson’s poems on my shelf. Haiku is a considerably more than the 17 syllable format, and originally they were written by two poets working together. As I was writing my haiku, I wanted to have that element of surprise created by a turn of a phrase, revealing something which was previously understood as one thing to become something else. And so taking a step forward with web server technology becomes a reflection looking backwards at the footprint – both literal and metaphysical – that is left behind.

There are more aspects of traditional haiku, such as references to nature, which are missing in my modest effort. I don’t pretend to creating art, but I do admit to having fun going through the exercise of paring my thoughts down to the correct structure while leaving something for the reader to appreciate and reflect upon. This is a familiar path with modern subjects: consider this anonymous twentieth century haiku that I learned as a child.

Schizophrenia.
I thought I was really sick!
I’m beside myself.

My distant recollection of a traditional Japanese poetry aside, I must acknowledge the inspiration I drew from the modern day Laughing Buddhas, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, the provocateurs of National Public Radio’s Car Talk. Some time ago they presented a series of automotive haiku on their show. This one instantly caught my imagination.

Four-wheel drive pickup
I remember his last words
”Hold my beer. Watch this.”

I hope that my humble three-line poem expressed some of the joy and playfulness found in this haiku, which turns the commonplace truck and driver into a series of moments for consideration, wonder and surprise.

Now that you understand what it means, my sources of inspiration, and all that… please vote for my haiku! Tell all of your friends to vote for me, poet vstuart, too. Voting closes Friday, January 29, 2010 at midnight Pacific time.

Doug Purdy has blogged that Microsoft’s “Oslo” project has been realigned and unveiled as SQL Server Modeling at VSConnections this week. There will be additional announcements and a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) released at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC09) next week, so stay tuned.

Doug’s post provides a brief recap of the jigs and jogs that have been the history of the “Oslo” codename, starting with the announcement at the 2007 Microsoft SOA and BP conference where it was the term applied to a broad multiple product initiative for modeling. I was fortunate to be in attendance for the initial announcement, and have followed the winding path of Oslo, so I am keenly interested in the Oslo-related keynotes and sessions at PDC to which Doug posted some handy links earlier. And, of course, I can’t wait to get my hands on the next set of bits.

As I see it, modeling and DSLs have been underrated by most of the software development community, and that is largely due to the lack of first-class mainstream support in the form of great technologies and equally great tools. Sure, there have been some great strides, like the Domain-Specific Language Tools in Visual Studio, but you can hardly characterize their use as widespread. And, no doubt, Martin Fowler’s upcoming book on DSLs (which you can read as a work-in-progress) will help raise the level of discussion and general awareness of the concept. And there are many other efforts in the world as well. But there is much left to do.

Why is modeling so important? Because as an industry we work too hard for too long to create applications, using general purpose languages and low-level technologies, essentially from scratch each time. It is high time to evolve past that approach and dramatically reduce the cost and time-to-market for broad classes of applications that businesses need today. That is why I am excited about SQL Server Modeling (née Oslo) and that’s why I want it to be a truly great modeling platform.

Steve Martin (no, the other Steve Martin) recently blogged about the Beta release of BizTalk Server 2009 — and there was much rejoicing. If you haven’t been keeping up — and who can keep up with everything? — Microsoft announced in September 2008 that the effort formerly known as BizTalk Server (BTS) 2006 R3 will be BTS 2009 and will be a full release of the product.

But back to our story: Steve also highlighted the release of the ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP October 2008, based on the BTS 2009 Beta, which updates the existing guidance, Microsoft ESB Guidance for BTS 2006 R2, from November 2007.

The ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP is delivered as a zip file which contains two MSI files (for x86 and x64) and an installation doc. For now, I am primarily interested in the documentation, so I performed and administrative installation of the MSI using the msiexec.exe command line utility:

msiexec /a "ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP October 2008.msi"

I don’t know how msiexec.exe determines the destination of an administrative installation, but I found the results easily enough in “D:\Programs\Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 CTP – October 2008”. In the Docs folder is a compiled help (.chm) file with the goods. Happy reading.

Bonus track. If terms like BTS, ESB, SOA, and BPM are the very stuff that piques your interest, then take note of the 2009 Microsoft SOA and BP Conference in Redmond, January 28–29, 2009, and the accompanying road show. Last year’s SOA and BP Conference is where Microsoft publically announced the Oslo initiative. This year’s conference looks to be quite compelling.

A story on NPR's All Things Considered considers if cloud computing will work in the White House.

Both Google and Microsoft are lobbying the Obama transition team to adopt cloud computing to get work done in the White House. In the story, security expert Kevin Jackson discusses how cloud computing can make data and computing more secure than traditional systems. It would also improve collaboration, an area that government is particularly bad at. Vince Cerf, the so-called father of the Internet, who now works at Google, opines that cloud computing would also be a good paradigm for the new administration to help achieve the new openness that has been championed.

My friend and fellow Microsoft MVP, Roman Kiss, has published an article on CodeProject this month describing the design and implementation of a WCF extension for exporting WSDL documentation (<wsdl:documentation>) and XSD annotation (<xs:annotation>) elements in your contract.

Roman is the author of some three dozen other articles on CodeProject, including the popular Null Transport for WCF which describes a custom in-process transport for WCF. If you are deep in WCF and don't know Roman's excellent work, take some time to acquaint yourself with his wealth of knowledge.

Heck, yeah: I am going to PDC2008. I've been getting psyched about this conference for a number of months now, but I had to coordinate with wife, life, and the job scene. It is truly amazing how much you can do with WS-Coordination. Now all is coordinated: LA here I come.

The keynotes. Okay, I have to get this one little thing off my chest. I have immense respect for Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. But I have seen him deliver keynote addresses three times (twice live, once by webcast) and I have yet to be inspired. Sure, it is hard to compete with the explosive dynamism of, say, Steve "Developers! Developers!!" Ballmer, and I firmly believe everyone needs to find his or her authentic and individual style. But Ray — uh, you are reading my blog, aren't you, Ray? — my recommendation is you work at connecting, I mean really connecting at a visceral level, with the developers at the PDC. Make it relevant. Make us care. Make us scream and shout. Make it a cathartic experience, with the young folk passing out in the aisles. Don't go overboard, but aim high.

There are three other keynote addressers in the line up. Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research, is in the plum position of telling us about cool and groovy things coming down the pike from the Research Labs. I enjoyed his similar talk at PDC03, so I am waiting to see what Rick has to show us another five years along the technology arc.

Then there is the dynamic duo of Don Box and Chris Anderson, each of them Batman to the other's Boy Wonder. It would be hard for me to hide my admiration for these two big brains. Both of them think big, make it real for the developers, and can go deep without making your head explode. Expect the Chris and Don Show to deliver the goods on the main attraction: The Oslo Story.

Open your mind with Open Space. I have chaired the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at a number Microsoft conferences. There is always a lot of work leading up to and at the conference. It's incredibly rewarding work, both exhilarating and exhausting. We obsess over how to keep the BoFs fresh, exciting, and compelling. From my personal vantage point, I am absolutely delighted to see Microsoft experimenting with new forms for attendee interaction.

The Open Space concept has been around since 1985, and it's been enjoying a rapidly expanding mindshare in the last few years. Microsoft held Open Space sessions at MIX08 and the 2008 MVP Summit. Building on those experiences, PDC2008 will feature Open Space sessions each day of the conference as part of the UnSessions. Think of them as a more spontaneous form of BoF sessions, and you'll be on the right track.

Sessions, sessions, sessions. The list of announced sessions continues to grow, featuring some very interesting topics. Oslo, Cloud Services, Mesh, Zermatt, Rosario, F#, .NET 4.0, Windows 7... it is all so exciting it will be hard to pick and choose which breakout sessions to go to.

Are you going to PDC2008? If so, see you in October.

The Architecture Journal devotes the latest issue (Journal 16, July 2008) to Identity and Access, a topic near and dear to my heart. You can read the issue online, download it as a zipped PDF, or view it and all issues offline in the Architecture Journal Reader. This issue has a lot to offer, so dig right in.

I want to call out two personal highlights. First is an article on federated identity patterns by fellow Connected Systems MVP Jesus Rodriguez and his colleague Joe Klug. Jesus and Joe are Chief Architect and CTO, respectively, at Tellago.

Second is an article on claims and identity for on-premise and cloud solutions by Vittorio Bertocci. Vittorio's article serves as a nice background for Zermatt, which is the project codename for a Microsoft .NET framework for writing claims-aware applications that Vittorio announced in July.

On the lighter side, the issue includes a profile of Kim Cameron, Identity Architect in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division. Kim is the author of the Laws of Identity which can be found on his blog, identityblog.com.

This issue also introduces Diego Dagum as the new editor of The Architecture Journal, who takes the baton from Simon Guest (the only person at Microsoft who can logon as 'guest').

Diego is calling for papers on Green Computing for a future Journal issue, abstracts due by 10 September 2009. If you've got something to contribute, let him know.

Just in case you missed these three notable releases so far this month...

SQL Server 2008 has Released To Manufacturing (RTM) and is available for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. There's also a free 180-day Full Trial and Express Edition which are available for download by everyone.

Following that up is a pair of complementary releases: .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1.  The .NET 3.5 SP1 includes performance improvements, ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services, and a version of the .NET runtime optimized for clients which weighs in at under 28 MB. On the VS2008 SP1 side of the house, there are both new and improved designers, improved VSTS features, and new controls. Plus both service packs provide support for SQL Server 2008. And a bunch more.

Scott Hanselman blogged a nice guide to the combined service packs.

Microsoft announced their Oslo Initiative last October at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference 2007. You can read what they said then. I am sure the audience and the timing were right. But since then not a whole lot has been said publicly about Oslo.

The wraps started coming off in June, at the TechEd 2008 Developers Conference. Bill Gates painted some broad strokes in his keynote address. He spoke briefly about rich modeling and how Oslo is about much more than a repository for that modeling data. He announced the next milestone is producing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Oslo in the PDC2008 timeframe this October. (I bet that pressure is on to actually deliver bits at the PDC.)

Also at TechEd 2008, David Chappell gave a talk titled "Introducing Oslo". Interestingly, the talk was listed in the conference guide as "Road to Oslo" but by the time the conference the product team decided to unveil some of the key concepts to the developer community. That talk is on the TechEd 2008 DVDs, but I couldn't find it available online.

However, David also was interviewed by Ron Jacobs about Olso, and he hits the highlights. That interview and two related ones are available on the TechEd TechTalks site. The best method for locating these videos is to browse to the Microsoft TechEd Online Developers Library and enter "oslo" into the library search. (I wish there were better URLs for these individual TechTalks. Hint, hint.) From there you can choose from a number of video formats. Here are the three sessions you should get from the search.

• "The Road to Oslo: The Microsoft Services and Modeling Platform" with David Chappell and Ron Jacobs.
• "The Future of Modeling" with Steven Martin and Ron Bagby.
• "Framework and Microsoft BizTalk Best Practices with an Eye Toward Oslo" with Jon Flanders and Ron Jacobs.

Now there is news from my fellow MVP, Brian Loesgen, that he will be the second person (after David Chappell) speaking publicly about Oslo. He is presenting "A Preview of Oslo" at the First Annual International SOA Symposium in Amsterdam on October 7–8, 2008. It looks like a great conference, with keynote addresses from Thomas Erl and the other David Chappell (VP and chief technologist for SOA at Oracle). A perfect excuse to visit Holland this fall. But if Holland isn't on your dance card, Brian is looking forward to giving many other talks on Oslo.

And look for much more news at the PDC2008, October 27–30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. To whet your appetite, the conference website recently doubled the number of published sessions.

My Tech·Ed 2008 North America DVD set arrived in my mailbox this morning! I am like a kid in a candy shop. Because I got busy during the conference with co-chairing Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, side meetings, and some quality time in the architecture lounge with the Ask The Experts, I didn't get to all of the breakout sessions I had scheduled. And I was only at the Developers week: there were some IT Professionals sessions that sounded pretty interesting. Now I can explore 650 sessions from both Tech·Ed weeks from the comfort of my laptop. I am jazzed.

Handy tip: the Developers sessions are on discs 1 through 5, the IT Pro sessions are on discs 6 through 9. The labeling or insert could have made that clear. But don't worry, it's all there.

If you didn't attend Tech·Ed 2008 North America, you can will be able to purchase the DVD set from the Microsoft Event DVD Store. (Yeah, I just learned that such a thing existed. Nice to know.) The Tech·Ed 2008 set is listed as "coming soon." Since I just received my set in the mail, I assume that means really soon now.

There is also a good deal of content available at TechEd Online including the conference keynotes and Tech·Talks.

Next year Tech·Ed moves to Los Angeles, California, and it moves up a month: May 12-15, 2009 for Developers, and May 19-22, 2009 for IT Professionals.

Last week I gave a Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) presentation at the Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG). I figured it's summer, a couple of days ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, I should be prepared to have six people in attendance. But, in truth, it was around to 30. Not bad considering the competition. And it was great group for breaking in my new WF talk with several excellent questions and comments from the audience. And there was general beer drinking and WF merriment at Gustav's afterwards.

A PDF of the slides is available for you to download and enjoy.

Increase and decrease font size from the keyboard. I got tied up in traffic on the way to the talk, which discombobulated me slightly, and I forgot to bump up the font sizes in Visual Studio the way I always do. Thankfully, someone called the small fonts to my attention. As if on queue, Rich Claussen talked me through Sara Ford's Visual Studio Tip #242: "Did you know… You can bind macros to keyboard shortcuts (or how to quickly increase / decrease your text editor font size)?" That totally rocks. Thanks, Rich. Thanks, Sara.

Change font and size of IntelliSense. While I was looking that tip, I ran across an equally awesome tip for presenters on Sara's blog, "How to change the font and font size for Intellisense: Statement Completion, Parameter Info, and Quick Tips." I can see this one will be really handy for presentations where I am using IntelliSense to discover and explore some kind of object model. Nice.

Cliff Simpkins in CSD, replied very promptly to my post over the weekend asking why there was no Visual Studio in the WF tutorials.

It turns out that the tutorials I was looking at were old versions from the original .NET Framework SDK. The SDK clearly doesn't include Visual Studio, hence no mention of Visual Studio. That makes sense.

For whatever reason, the tutorial links that are on the Windows Workflow Foundation Tutorials page in the MSDN Library link to the old, SDK-only versions of the tutorials. MSDN is working on getting those updated to link to the modern versions of the tutorials. That might take a week or so if there are other priority things in the MSDN queue.

In the meantime, you can get to all of the modern versions of the WF tutorials by navigating the tutorials using the tree view on the left. I think you want to use this exclusively until MSDN fixes all the links.

The modern versions of the tutorials guide you through using either Visual Studio or a POTE (plain old text editor). Sweetness.

You can tell if you are looking at an old SDK-only version of a tutorial because the tree view on the left will be severely truncated and not show the page you are viewing, and the navigation controls at the top of the right page will only show "MSDN | MSDN Library" instead of several additional levels.

Additional resources

Cliff also pointed me to some other WF resources to share. First stop is the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/workflow (score bonus points for the cool URL.)

Next up, HelpDesk v1.0 is a sample web app that demonstrates WF on TryIt Channel9.

Finally, there is a nascent collection of Windows Workflow Foundation articles and overviews on MSDN. Good stuff there, and I expect more over time as Microsoft continues investing in WF.

Updated 17 June 2008: Cliff in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division quickly identified the problem. See Yes, we have Visual Studio in WF tutorials for the full story. I was buried yesterday or I would have posted the update sooner!

I had a notion to see what the WF training materials on MSDN were like. Straight away I hit upon a conundrum.

Does anyone out there have a clue why the Windows Workflow Foundation tutorials on MSDN Library studiously avoids use of Visual Studio?

The first tutorial, creating a sequential workflow, Exercise 1, Task 1 has you creating a .csproj file and pasting in a few dozen lines of XML without explanation of why we're going down this path. What's wrong with VS2008's File | New | Project?

Then it has you cut-and-paste over 200 lines of code into a .cs file for a Windows Form application, most of it in InitializeComponent which I am guessing was generated in the VS designer. That's wacky.

Sure, it is a time saver, and purely ancillary to the WF topic, but this is not how I start building applications. And nary a word of why.

What gives?

Pat Helland is an architect at Microsoft. He has worked on a lot of deep technology, including the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC). The late, legendary Jim Gray was his mentor. He wrote the reasonably popular article Metropolis, "a metaphor for the evolution of information technology into the world of service-oriented architectures," which appeared in Microsoft's Architecture Journal 2 (April 2004). A while back he left Microsoft and went to work at Amazon, and now he is back at Microsoft.

One of his recent talks is The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects (1:15:37) recorded at TechEd EMEA in November 2007. The thesis of this talk: "the way technology is going, we will be changing the way we build our applications." He describes several forces that are or will be driving our future, and then looks at where they are driving it, namely a world of moveable objects where there is no one true record.

Some of this technology is here today. Eye-opening technology, like buying a datacenter in a shipping container. Current and future vendors include Sun, Dell, Google, Rackable, and others. A key concept is that you never open the container: if one or ten or a hundred servers fail, you just leave them in place and continue operations.

Helland sure gives you one helluva lot to think about here.

With the TechEd 2008 Developers conference next week, Microsoft has announced the agenda for PDC 2008 including sessions and unsessions (don't ask questions, just go there.) PDC 2008 happens October 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. There is an early-bird registration discount of $200 until August 15, off of the full conference price of $2,395 USD.

Start making plans now.

I attended the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle and Redmond, Washington last week. Great technology and it is always nice to mingle with 1,700 of my closest übernerd friends. Monday and Thursday we were all together in Seattle's WSCTC for keynotes, general meetings, and Open Spaces sessions. That formed the crunchy outer shell around the dense chewy inner nougat of breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday held at various locations on the Redmond campus.

I attended the Connected Systems Division (CSD) track, where the first session answered one question on everyone's mind, "can we blog/twitter/podcast/text/talk about the track sessions?" There were several answers: no, no, no, no, and no. Okay, we are allowed to say that we were at the MVP Summit in the CSD track, and that we talked about Oslo. And that's it. Here goes:

I went to the MVP Summit and attended the CSD track. We talked about Oslo. It was cool.

Now what else can I talk about? Great Party with Palermo on Sunday evening. On Monday, Sean O'Driscoll, who will be leaving Microsoft shortly, gave a great speech about community. I liked the Open Spaces sessions on Monday afternoon, they were fairly similar in nature to Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that I help run at TechEd and PDC, so I was right at home. Michelle Laroux Bustamante led a WCF discussion, and Roman Kiss talked about his WCF null channel on Code Project. It was great to catch up with Roman on several issues during the Summit. Monday evening I I geeked it up with Sam Gentile and other folks from Neudesic, and then I ducked out of the reception to work on the TechEd BOF sessions.

At Tuesday night's CSD dinner I had the pleasure of dining with Don Box, and then discussing deployment woes and aspirations with Sasha. I was so engrossed in the conversation I didn't realized everyone else had left the restaurant, and sprinted back to the shuttle bus just in time. Wednesday night was the attendee party at the EMP, where I had some fun sharing around my new light-up juggling balls. Lots of geeks juggle.

Thursday we heard keynote sessions and Q&A with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. Ozzy's keynote was interesting, but I personally felt it missed the mark on being inspiring. In fairness, MVPs are a tough crowd.  Ballmer, by contrast, is a dynamic character on and off the stage, and had some good answers to tough questions. Thursday afternoon I was back on campus for some follow-up CSD sessions about some very exciting technology.

Thursday evening I met up with Australian Regional Director Adam Cogan and we had dinner and discussed versioning for services. Adam was asking all the right questions. How come we don't have any of the right answers? And why aren't they baked into the platform?

Friday the Summit was over, but I had some meetings on campus. While waiting for a public transit bus from Seattle to Redmond, I got an added bonus to my trip: Pat Helland walked up an introduced himself. As luck would have it, that's his daily commute bus. We had a great conversation on the ride in.

All in all, it was a great geek week.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer, used his April 8 keynote address at RSA Conference 2008 to introduce End to End Trust, a Microsoft initiative built on authenticating identities and securing Web-based transactions and communications.

"We don't want this to be interpreted as a Microsoft play. We're saying that these are the concepts that we generally support and we've put them together in this white paper and we're asking the industry to talk about it...”

— George Stathakopoulos, general manager of security response, Microsoft, quoted in eWeek article

Craig Mundie's End to End Trust keynote address from the conference is available as webcast or transcript. Microsoft's press release provides an overview, and a related eWeek article frames the issue for a broader audience. The real goods, including the cornerstone whitepaper, are at www.microsoft.com/endtoendtrust.

The InnoTech 2008 conference is here in Portland, Oregon, April 16 – 17, 2008, at the Oregon Convention Center. There are a lot of events included in the conference or associated with it. You may be particularly interested in two of those events.

The Developers track runs on Wednesday, April 16, and Thursday, April 17, and features ten sessions. A number of my friends and colleagues are presenting:

• Erik Mork, Silverlight 2: How Web Applications will be Made
• Andrew Hay, Understanding LINQ
• Patrick Cauldwell, The Code Is the Easy Part
• Michael Lynch, Patterns for Separating UI Code from Business Logic
• Travis Illig, Unit Testing with TypeMock

And the other sessions look great, too. A big hand to my fellow SAO Development SIG committee member, Mark Lawler, for putting the track together.

The Open Source Summit runs on Thursday, April 17. One of the many things that I really respect about the open source community is their creativity when it comes to presentations and conferences. The Open In Oregon Lightning Talks session features seven snapshot 'lightning talks' by an outstanding panel of presenters. Nice.

InnoTech 2008 is presented by the Software Association of Oregon and EasyStreet Online Services.

I am delighted and honored to receive Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2008 Award for Connected System Developer. This is my third consecutive year receiving the MVP award. Thank you to the folks in Microsoft's MVP program and Connected Systems Division for this award.

Microsoft's Connected Systems Division owns the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), CardSpace, and BizTalk Server (BTS) technologies. BTS gains a new focus and considerable prominence in Project Oslo.

Thanks so much, I really appreciate this award.

In my view... U-Prove is the equivalent in the privacy world of RSA in the security space. It does things we wouldn’t have otherwise thought possible.
— Kim Cameron

On 6 March 2008 Microsoft acquired Credentica, a Montreal-based company with some remarkable cryptography technology called U-Prove. The technology allows a user to disclose the absolute minimum information required in any given situation. U-Prove has been developed by Stefan Brands over the past two decades. In addition to acquiring the U-Prove technology and patent portfolio, Stefen Brands, and his colleagues Christian Paquin and Greg Thompson have joined Microsoft's Identity and Access Group. The U-Prove technology will be integrated in Microsoft's user-centric CardSpace identity metasystem and Windows Communication Foundation.

Stefan Brands, who ignored several previous offers, is excited about the Microsoft acquisition.

In turn, Microsoft's identity architect, Kim Cameron, is notably delighted with the acquisition.

Our goal is that Minimal Disclosure Tokens will become base features of identity platforms and products, leading to the safest possible Internet.  I don’t think the point here is ultimately to make a dollar.  It’s about building a system of identity that can withstand the ravages that the Internet will unleash. That will be worth billions.
— Kim Cameron

Kim has several blog posts related to the acquisition, which I link to and quote from here:

Microsoft to adopt Stefan Brands’ Technology (6 March 2008)

In my view... U-Prove is the equivalent in the privacy world of RSA in the security space. It does things we wouldn’t have otherwise thought possible.  At one time “public key” was considered an oxymoron - but the properties of RSA were so compelling they completely changed our thinking about keys.

The same, I think, is true of the zero knowledge proofs and “blinded signatures” Stefan has perfected. When you first hear about their capabilities, you say, “Well, that’s impossible.” But if you look into the math, it's not. It actually works.

If you are inclined to look into the math, Stephan Brands's book, Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates; Building in Privacy (MIT Press, 2000, ISBN 0-262-02491-8) is available in PDF form. Like most dense and chewy material, I do better reading my mathematics better in a dead tree format.

Know your need (6 March 2008). Need to know, know your need, need for security and privacy now.

Reactions to Credentica acquisition (9 March 2008). A reaction rodeo round-up.

Ralf Bendrath on the Credentica acquisition (9 March 2008)

Ralf Bendrath is a person who thinks about privacy deeply...

"Microsoft has acquired... Credentica. While that probably means nothing to most of you out there, it is one of the most important and promising developments in the digital identity world."

Microsoft says, “U-Prove it” (10 March 2008). Quotes Joe Wilcox at length, addressing some of Ralf Bendrath's comments.

Brendon Lynch, Microsoft Director of Privacy Strategy, helps explain what it all means.

In the great world beyond Redmond, Burton Group Identity Blog observes that Microsoft acquires Credentica, and there has been considerable press coverage by Washington Post, Network World, PC World, and eWeek's Microsoft Watch ("This is a damn, exciting acquisition." Hey, Joe, what is that comma doing there?)

I am working on getting my head around zero-knowledge proofs and minimal disclosure tokens. It is clear that I've got some deep reading ahead. Exciting times.

Last year we put together a team of folks from Corillian, Arcot, Wachovia, and the Microsoft CardSpace team and jointly created a proof-of-concept demo for a user logging into an online banking application using Microsoft CardSpace. I delivered the demo in the Microsoft booth at the RSA 2007 Conference for a whole week, and we had a lot of traffic since the technology was featured in Bill Gates's keynote address at the start of the conference.

Thanks to CardSpace team member Nigel Watling, you can view the demo on Microsoft's Channel 9. We designed the demo so we could use it to tell many different stories. This is one of them.

I am looking forward to reading Bob Uva's new technical blog, http://bobdotnet.wordpress.com. Bob is a friend and colleague at CheckFree, and he's particularly keen on sharing his impressions of WCF.

The Portland Adobe Developer User Group is hosting Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, on Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 6:00 PM, speaking on "What's Possible in a Post-Web 2.0 World?" at PCC Sylvania, Library Room 112. Networking begins at 5:30 PM.

Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new ideas built on Web Services. You will also learn how others, empowered by technology advances—known as “Web Scale Computing”—created businesses that weren’t practical until recently... (More...)

Amazon has done phenomenal things with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so this ought to be great.

See the Upcoming Meetings for the Portland Adobe Developer User Group for additional details.