I spent a little more time this afternoon polishing the info card login process on Casa dé Hambone. Let me know what you think.

I really liked how sxcore and sandbox.netfx3.com are handling their info card login. Sxcore specifically has a nice way of using a GET to kick off the process which eliminates the need to have a separate form element on the web page for the information card activator.

In addition to cleaning up the code, I

• Eliminated the "This page contains both secure and nonsecure items" warning by having Login.aspx fire off a GET to a handler that is 100% secure
• Activate the CardSpace UI from a separate dedicated handler page; the result is no CardSpace UI popping up if you attempt to anything else from the login page other than sign in with an info card
• Properly handle cases where you cancel submission of your info card and/or your browser does not have support for information cards
• Implemented a unique identifier for the click back handler that verifies your email address
• Automatically approve comments from information card users, even if comment moderation is enabled
• Turned off caching of the start page to accurately display the logged in state of normal users

What started as a simple project to Windows CardSpace-enable the DasBlog admin account has yielded a ton of key learning and design that you'll have to consider when adding support to your own site for information cards. The technology itself is cake ... the devil is in the details. Fortunately, I captured all of those details and decision points along the way and will be starting a series of blog posts on each one soon.

My information card support in DasBlog 1.9 for Casa dé Hambone has been refactored into a provider model that allows for pluggable identity token processors. In short, this means that my implementation can support both ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 installations where previously it required you to build DasBlog with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0.

I'm getting really close to completing the fit 'n finish work here and making a SVN patch available to anyone who is interested.

Would you look at that. The fine folks over at WinZip finally got around to delivering a 64-bit version of their shell extensions. Maybe its time to come back, but I made a switch some time ago to WinRAR because of the stock "there's no demand for 64-bit shell extensions" response from WinZip.

What could be better than yesterday's announcement that I've added authenticated comments and support of Windows CardSpace to DasBlog? Well, lots of things - like the gnocchi in a meat sauce from Dino's Pizzeria that I'm going to go pick up right after I finish this entry.

But the additional features I'm thinking of for DasBlog include:

• New user registration without an information card (i.e., registered users for the rest of us)
• Password recovery (for those users who choose to not use an information card)
• Self-editing of the user profile (including hose who choose to not use an information card)
• Support for auto-approval of comments on moderated blogs when left by authenticated users

Its interesting, actually, how my simple desire to support information cards as a form of authentication has kinda opened the door to a whole host of features that "just make sense" once you cross that bridge. The saving grace throughout all of this is the architecture of DasBlog makes it pretty straightforward to implement these features.

What else do you think falls into this bucket?

DasBlog 1.9.6264.0. Authenticated comments. Windows CardSpace. Working. Try it out right now by signing in with your information card and then leaving a comment on this post. Inclusion of your web page claim is optional; include during the initial card selection if you want your web page linked to your name when leaving a comment. Let me know what you think.

Has this guy ever sat inside a high rise office building or even the basement of a Midwestern home and struggled to get a reliable cellular signal? In his article about how once again the browser will make Windows irrelevant, he sings the joys of living with an Internet-connected mobile device:

Things will get more exciting for entrepreneurs when we all start walking around with new Internet-ready portable devices such as the Nokia 770 Internet tablet or smartphones such as the Motorola Q and Nokia E61.

These pocket-size monsters with keyboards, luscious displays, and brisk 3G connections will soon replace laptops. All they need are browsers that can access Web-based software as easily as your desktop can. (I already use a Nokia E61 to help manage my website and write short blog posts from within the phone's browser. Soon I'll be able to run the whole site from my phone's browser.)

Pocket-size monsters? Luscious displays and brisk 3G connections replacing laptops? Please. Have you looked at the trend lately in flat panel monitors, HD televisions and laptop computers? Bigger. Wider. Not some 800x600 web-only display that requires a stylus for input. And brisk 3G connections? Surely you must mean the brisk 3G connection that is always reachable and never (ever) manages to crap out right about the time you either really need it or want to demonstrate your cool new Internet-ready portable device to your friend.

When I'm working with an office productivity app... excuse me. When I'm working with 2007 Microsoft Office, I don't want to worry if Ctrl+S is really going to work or not because my "brisk 3G [Internet] connection" may or may not be available. I don't plan on reducing the speed in which I type to fit that of a stylus or T9 text input. I don't plan on growing smaller thumbs to tap out brief messages on the keyboard of some device that makes my Dockers look I'm trying to impress the ladies.

The dream is there. I'm sure we'll reach it some day, likely even within my lifetime. But laptops are not going away any time soon. Speaking of which, I need to get busy on that order of Dell Latitude D820's ...

Taking inspiration from Kim Cameron and how he CardSpace-enabled WordPress, I did the same with DasBlog 1.9.6264.0. casadehambone.com now supports logging into the administrative account using Windows CardSpace allowing me to throw the use of passwords to the wind!

The great thing is that it only took minor changes to three source files and the introduction of one new configuration option each to site.config and siteSecurity.config. I have a little more work before me to make configuration just a tad easier, but the great thing is that this works really well.

I owe special thanks to Clemens Vasters who suggested this morning that the proper "hack" to get this working was to build DasBlog with Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project add-on. DasBlog built out-of-the-box without issue, making the integration of TokenProcessor.cs to decrypt the SAML token a piece of cake.

If you haven't looked at Windows CardSpace yet, head on over to cardspace.netfx3.com and start reading. Now that Windows Internet Explorer 7.0 is released and Release Candidate 1 of .NET Framework 3.0 is available, you'll find the mainstream barriers to adoption are quickly eroding.

Get yourself over to http://ajax.asp.net and check out the just-released content for ASP.NET AJAX!

ASP.NET AJAX. is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers.

One of the more painful processes on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is granting read permission to the private keys of a certificate. It typically requires a few trips to your favorite search engine, msdn.microsoft.com and running winhttpcertcfg.exe.

In Windows Vista, the Certificate MMC snap-in has a new feature that enables you to directly manage the permissions of private keys associated with a given certificate.

Assuming you already have your certificate installed in the Local Machine store, fire up mmc.exe, add the Certificates snap-in to the console and choose Computer account on the Local computer. Expand Certificates | Personal | Certificates and locate the certificate to whom's private keys you'd like to grant read permissions. Right-click on the certificate, choose All Tasks | Manage Private Keys ... and you'll be starting at a standard Windows ACL editor. No muss. No fuss. Nice 'n clean the way it should have been from the beginning. If you're using a stock ASP.NET 2.0 configuration, you'll want to grant NETWORK SERVICE read rights. If you're running your application pool under another identity or performing impersonation, you'll need to adapt accordingly. In either case, this is far easier than the old hunt 'n peck method.

As I mentioned here, Scoble points out that IE7 renders TechMeme slower than Firefox 2. A true statement. Another true statement is that Firefox isn't respecting the <META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="now"> tag. Furthermore, Firefox doesn't respect its own "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" option. And this, my friends, is the heart of the performance difference in this test.

So let's we peel the onion just a bit, shall we? Fire up Fiddler, configure both browsers to use it as their proxy and rerun the TechMeme test. You'll see that Firefox makes only a few requests for page content whereas IE7 requests the entire page. The result is that Firefox makes that page pop because it is pulling its page content from cache. If you select Tools | Clear Private Data... in Firefox, shut it down and run the test again, you'll find that the experience is identical to that in IE7. IE7 is doing the right thing. Firefox isn't.

I did some more digging and played around with Firefox's "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" option. After enabling it and exiting Firefox, I relaunched it for for TechMeme home page again and was surprised to find that it was still pulling data from cache ... despite having been set to erase Browsing History, Download History, Saved From Information, Cache and Authenticated sessions when closing Firefox! Note this is distinctly different behavior from choosing Tools | Clear Private Data...

[Edit: Firefox does respect the "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" when the last instance of Firefox exits rather than for closing each window.]

Scoble knocks IE7's performance compared to Firefox 2 and I had to see it to believe it. Given I've been living in IE7 for months - and more recently with IE7 on Windows Vista - I've never given performance a thought, which tells me either that performance has been fine or I'm simply ignorant. Likely a little of both. But I wonder, does it really matter?

Even so, I tried Robert's test (and that meant actually downloading Firefox) by setting the home pages for both browsers to http://www.techmeme.com and sure enough, there's a noticeable difference in overall rendering speed. Firefox's rendering makes the page just "pop" whereas IE7 spends some visible time tweaking the page as it downloads. It's almost as if IE7 is not grabbing the image files from cache.

In fact, I tried the same test with sandbox.netfx3.com and see the same rendering behavior by both browsers on the first visit. But on subsequent visits, Firefox again makes the page "pop" where as IE7 appears to be downloading the content.

As for his beef about AJAX performance, on my 64-bit Windows Vista RC2 machine, I do not see any difference in the experience between IE7 and Firefox like he describes using Google Maps.

I've been getting my feet wet with Windows CardSpace and my self-issued card. In watching Kim Cameron's demonstration of how he integrated CardSpace with Wordpress, I saw his nifty looking card with his portrait on it. Right then and there I decided I too must have one. What do you think of the results? Here's how I did it.

I made a self portrait with my Canon EOS 20D and an EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens.  I extracted the headshot with Photoshop CS2's Extract filter, did some complexion touch up and resized it to what you see here, about 60x64 at the shoulder. I created a new 120x80 image according to the guidance provided by Vittorio Bertocci in his great article about how images are mapped onto cards. From here, it's all a composite. There's a layer for the black rectangle across the bottom, a layer for the gradient background, a layer for my portrait, and a layer each for the text. It took some experimenting with fonts and text transformation to arrive at the setting you see here - by far the largest part of this entire exercise. My Layers palette is reproduced here for your reference. Frankly, I'm surprised by the result because I'm by no means a Photoshop guru. But I think I now have something cool to liven up casadehambone.com with!

Vista does one annoying little thing in the reflection it places on the top third of the card when it renders it within the Windows CardSpace UI. I can see how they're trying to be cool, but I think it detracts rather than adds to the overall experience.

So I conducted my first conference call with Windows Live Messenger and Verizon Web Calling. First major complaint ... I was dinged the 1.9 cent per minute fee even though I was calling an 866 number. With Skybe being free until at least the end of the year for domestic calls, I'll use the remainder of my Windows Live Messenger minutes "for fun" and then likely continue to use Skype of there are month's remaining in the year. Second complaint is the audio level of the phone call with Windows Live Messenger was too soft - even with everything within the UI cranked up to 11. I dialed into the same call, same headset, etc., with Skype and things were loud and clear. My only complaint about Skype is the dial pad UI ... too much stuff on the dial pad screen. Just make it clean. Don't put all those other text boxes on the dial pad.

I've used Skype with SkypeOut from time to time when joining conference calls from home. Rather than tie up a land line or spend hours cramped on my mobile phone with spotty reception, I've found that PC-to-land line calling has been a viable option. Today I signed up for Verizon Web Calling via Windows Live Messenger. The FAQ didn't mention anything about the costs of calling 800 or 866 numbers. My hope is that I don't get charged per-minute fees for doing so. Nonetheless, eating our own dogfood is always a good thing.

Never have I tried to record audio from within a virtual machine, but given my recent problem of breaking Camtasia Recorder with my upgrade to Windows Vista RC2, I figured I'd give my virtualized Windows XP system a try. I'm happy to report that Virtual PC 2007 does a fine job of recording audio and that Camtasia Recorder worked great within the virtual instance. Now I can prepare to complete my voice overs on the demos I recorded with Bill Hahn.

Went to record some voice overs tonight on some demos I did with Bill Hahn only to discover that Camtasia Studio isn't happy interleaving audio/video via Camtasia Recorder on Windows Vista RC2. In the morning, I'll have to try it out over on the 32-bit box and hope for the best. Once again my zeal to move the state of Casa dé Hambone forward along the adoption curves manages to get in the way of getting needed work done.

[Edit: Just checked on the 32-bit installation and it shows the same behavior. Grrr.]

I don't know why, but this rather simple (and well produced, I might add) video about free hugs is inspiring and moving. Now if I could get URGE to install on 64-bit Windows Vista RC2 I could purchase the audio track.

Adobe Flash doesn't support 64-bit browsers and they are "evaluating requests for support of 64-bit operating systems." Head over to adobe.com and let your voice be heard. Its actually kinda surprising that I've gone this long before actually seeing this problem ... a credit to how well Windows Vista masks when it loads the 32-bit version of the browser vs. when it loads the 64-bit version of the browser.

Search in Outlook 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh now seems broken after the installation of 64-bit Windows Vista RC2. No issues to report on my 32-bit installation. I've tried reinstalling Office with no change in behavior. I didn't realize how much I've come to rely upon search for finding information in my reference system until now.

[Edit: Turns out the upgrade did break search in Outlook 2007, but a repair of Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh put everything back in working order.]

Turns out the 32-bit Windows Vista RC2 upgrade from RC1 broke my notebook computer's domain membership in an odd way. I could still log into the machine with my domain credentials, seamlessly access Exchange over HTTP via single sign-on, etc., but I could not establish a VPN connection with IT Connection Manager. I'd be prompted for my SmartCard PIN, begin the connection but then fail on the attempt to reach our internal security server. A quick call to our helpdesk had me retry with the IPSec Policy Administration service stopped. No luck. So we removed the machine from the domain and tried to VPN again. Success! It appears there's some odd behavior in the RC1-to-RC2 upgrade that tries to pull forward domain membership, makes some incorrect assumptions and doesn't fully work as expected, but works just enough that you think it worked.

With the machine successfully connected to the VPN, I was able to rejoin it to the northamerica.corp.microsoft.com domain but was faced with a small challenge on reboot ... no more cached credentials for my domain account. Fortunately, logging on as the local Administrator and establishing a VPN connection is a persistent operation when choosing to switch users. I was able to Switch User and logon with my domain credentials, having them validated over the already established VPN connection and thereby creating a set of cached credentials.

I just signed up for the beta of soapbox on MSN Video, our alternative to YouTube and took a tour through the most viewed videos. Not surprising, the first few pages are loaded with racy videos that usually have a humorous twist.

Certainly not this.

The full formatting of 300GB completed after about 12 hours. I ran a full chkdsk that reported no errors even after copying 18GB of content over to it. Yes, I know that 18GB < 300GB, but I'm now starting to wonder if the prior problem wasn't caused by NTFS corruption due to prematurely removing the drive at some point. I'm encouraged that the full NTFS formatting didn't find any bad sectors. I'll keep my eye on it and this may be come the host drive for the virtualized casadehambone.com.

Keith indicates there are two camps out there: those who love the Windows Vista startup sound and those who would rather their computers be the strong silent type. Here at Casa dé Hambone, all of the computers except for my primary desktop (my 64-bit Windows Vista RC2 machine) are located in a closet. I live and die by Remote Desktop. On the odd occasion where I have to reboot one of the machines remotely (yes, I do truly mean the odd occasion - my machines have no erectile dysfunction that many attribute to poor quality in Windows), its is comforting now knowing that the machines have restarted by listening for the Windows Vista startup sound.

Chris123NT over on windows-now.com discovers that 64-bit Windows Vista really does work. Welcome to the club, Chris. 64-bit Windows Vista on a machine that can actually take advantage of it does indeed rocks.

Apparently all day and then some. In an attempt to see how bad a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB hard drive had failed, I decided to perform a complete NTFS format at about 10:00AM this morning. It's now 7:15PM and its a little more than 3/4 done. Either it takes forever to actually format 300GB or there's a ton of bad sectors that are being detected and retried. Interestingly enough, there have been none of the bad sounds typically associated with a hard drive gone bad. What torks me the most is that this drive is less than a year old and has already shown signs of failing. My sense is that it wasn't designed to be thrown in a backpack and be mobile. Still, it's not like I'm beating the crap out of the thing and I'd expect it to last longer. I wonder if there's any way to get it replaced by Maxtor. Well, after this format and a full chkdsk completes, I'll know the state of things.

We got home late last night and I went in to check on the status of the newly virtualized casadehambone.com. I quickly discovered why the machine I had chosen to host the virtual instance had been sitting on the shelf ... its hard drive was making a high-pitched clicking sound. Bad drive, and I had copied the actual virtual machine hard disk to this drive in order to free up my portable hard drive for normal backpacking uses. The portable hard drive is now connected to my Windows Vista RC2 tablet pc just to keep casadehambone.com up and running for the time being.

I happened to have one more 40GB hard drive that I put into the newly designated host and have installed 32-bit Windows Vista RC2 on it. (For those keeping score at home, that's four Windows Vista RC2 installations and one Windows Server 2003 installation in the span of three days.) Hoping that this installation will be a keeper for a bit, I'm venturing further into the rat hole and installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 (zomg that's a mouthful; note the link points to R2 and not R2 SP1 Beta 2. Head over to http://connect.microsoft.com and apply for the R2 SP1 Beta 2 program and download it there.) to host the virtual instance. What's the chances this will actually work on Windows Vista RC2 with IIS 7.0?

Knowing that IIS 7.0 has been componetized to high heaven and that Virtual Server uses things like CGI scripts, Windows authentication, etc., I started down the path of some web research to find out what I was going to need to enable in order to get Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 running. I came across this post by Dave Northey which also pulls through some of the stuff from Ben Armstrong, our Virtual PC Guy. Short version is that I took Dave's lead and installed everything except ftp for IIS 7.0. It makes me a little uncomfortable having everything turned on and I'll likely go back and turn some stuff of after some further research. Needless to say, Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 installed just fine on Windows Vista RC2.

The next challenge was in getting Internet Explorer connected to the Virtual Server administration site. Despite my attempts to enable Windows Authentication, run IE as Administrator, etc., I had nothing but heartache. Turns out IE was treating http://localhost as being in the Internet Zone rather than the Intranet Zone. Adding http://localhost to the Intranet Zone sites fixed that little issue and I've no issue accessing the Virtual Server administration web site. Furthermore, I'm browsing the site with UAC turned on and no explicit need to run IE as Administrator whatsoever. This is goodness. [Edit: Turns out I had not rebooted after re-enabling UAC. Doing so broke the ability to sign into the Virtual Server administration web console and I had to setup a shortcut to Internet Explorer and run it as Administrator as outlined in the articles above.]

So, as I write this, the virtualized casadehabmone.com is now running under Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 and (hopefully) will be stable for a while once again.

Windows Vista RC2 automatically switched me out of Aero and into Basic when running Photoshop CS2. Unexpected, but acceptable. What was really cool was that it switched back to Aero automatically when I exited Photoshop.

The machine I was going to use to host the physical hard drive from the failed casadehambone.com server turns out to have 2GB of memory in it already. So rather than going out and purchasing 2GB of memory for my Media Center PC (which would still be a good idea, by the way) as the Virtual PC 2007 host, I decided instead to put 32-bit Windows Vista RC2 on yet another machine here at Casa dé Hambone and use it to host the newly virtualized casadehambone.com.

Now here's a kicker ... this machine is about three years old at this point though it's pimped out for its day. 2GB of memory, an 80GB hard drive and a decently productive graphics card. 100% clean install of 32-bit Windows Vista RC2 completes in less than an hour, as compared to 90 minutes for the 32-bit upgrade and about two hours for the 64-bit upgrade. What's up with that!?

[Edit: a nice surprise is that with the addition of ATI's beta drivers for Windows Vista RC1, the host machine is actually running Aero and does a fine job of delivering the experience via Remote Desktop as well. How's that for a machine that is three years old, eh? Here's the Windows Experience Index to prove it.]

I'm really curious to know how many people actually leverage WSRP to run portlets in a variety of different portals. I'm not talking about writing the portlet here and running it over there. I'm specifically interested if people are actively writing portlets within their enterprises that are then consumed by multiple vendor's portals vs. writing a portlet and deploying it locally to your portal or portals?

Don't get me wrong, I understand the commercial value of WSRP, especially when you look at service providers like financial institutions. Having control over the application and the rendered content and enabling that to be accessed in an open fashion from something other than the service provider's direct web presence is a good thing. What I'm seeking to understand is the value of the enterprise/corporate developer in doing the same thing, i.e., developing a portlet with the express intent of exposing it via WSRP instead of developing a portlet to run directly within their vended portal.

I'm sure there are plenty of "vendor neutral" responses one could make such as, "implementing WSRP for our portlet allows us to not be tied to a portal vendor." Of course, this sounds surprisingly like the main reason I hear about customers standardizing on J2EE (i.e., "developing using J2EE allows us to not be tied to an application server vendor.") I've never seen one of my customers yet switch J2EE vendors and I bet they're likely to not switch portal vendors either, hence the nature of my question.

Scott Hanselman talks about the importance of being UTF-8 for DasBlog's configuration files in direct response to an issue I had resurrecting Casa dé Hambone.

During my installation of DasBlog, I unpacked the zip edited the site.config file straight away with Notepad. Unfortunately, what I ended up with was an ASCII encoded version of the file rather than a UTF-8 version of the file. What I'm not certain of is was this Notepad's doing or was the file straight out of the zip ASCII encoded. Inquiring minds want to know.

Thanks for getting me over the hump, Scott.

I'm sitting in on a demonstration of WSRP .NET Framework by NetUnity. Wow. If you're looking for a solution to create portlets and WSRP producers from ASP.NET you need look no further. This stuff rocks.

The Object Test Bench is, in my opinion, one of the lesser known features of Visual Studio 2005. The Object Test Bench provides a way for you to create instances of your classes within the Visual Studio 2005 IDE and then invoke methods on those objects, manipulate their properties and otherwise interact with those objects ... all without writing any code!

My Visual Studio 2005 Object Test Bench screencast is available for viewing here. And will shortly be available from the Casa dé Hambone Download Center as well.

I want to thank Ron Jacobs for recommending Camtasia Studio as the screen capture and production application of choice. The fine folks over at TechSmith, the creators of Camtasia Studio, have been awesome in getting me up and running on 64-bit Windows Vista RC1. And a very special thank you to Keith Combs for assisting me with the internal publishing procedure to get the screencast up on wm.microsoft.com.

I spent some quality time with the search engines tonight looking for a .Text to DasBlog converter and couldn't find a utility to actually do it. There's plenty of hits out there, but the sites are either now defunct or the one SourceForge project actually has nothing to download.

So I followed Scott Hanselman's example in Migrating Content from Random Blogs to DasBlog and built my own DotText2DasBlog. Casa dé Hambone now has its original content content dating back to March, 2004 including all of the related comments. The only thing I've not pulled forward is images.

The code is written in C# using Visual Studio 2005. It relies upon SQL Express and requires the .Text database (.text_Data.mdf) exist in the same directory as the running executable. The code is posted here on the Casa dé Hambone Download Center. You will also require the DasBlog newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime assembly included with DasBlog.

I sat here puzzled for longer than I care to admit as to why Visual Studio 2005 was hanging when opening a secure ftp site. Turns out I had chosen to "keep blocking" Visual Studio during the original Windows Firewall prompt. A quick visit to Control Panel > Security corrected the issue and the ftp site opened right up.

I had one of those, "Okay, this is cool" moments on Windows Vista today.

A long-time friend stopped by for dinner this evening with a mini-DV