First, go watch this video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SZzAT-S5DQ. Trust me. You'll be entertained and educated. It makes me laugh to see the number of comments that claim this is a "fake." What makes me laugh even more is to know that we actually released something like this.

Then, go visit http://www.powertogether.com and find out how you can get your own free, fully licensed versions of Windows Vista Business and Office Professional 2007.

In short, you need to complete three webcasts or virtual labs in each of the series to get your free copies. What better way to get your hands on the hottest software releases for the desktop this Christmas than to actually participate in free training?

During the early integration of information cards and Windows CardSpace into casadehambone.com, I required validation of your information card by e-mail address. I'm now removing all registered users from the database.

There are a couple of reasons as to why I'm doing this.

First, with the release of .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows CardSpace, a breaking change to the information card schema was introduced that forces you to create new information cards. With the creation of a new information card comes a new personal identifier, and it is your personal identifier that I stored in association with your account.

Since the work I've done to date on DasBlog does not support associating a new information card with an existing account, it does not make sense to hang on to the old personal identifier at all.

Second, I settled on an implementation that does not require validation in order to sign in to casadehambone.com. Rather, your information card is used to simply present your identity which I gladly accept. You're free to lie about your identity. Primarily your identity is used to form-fill comment pages. You can, in fact, not authenticate and still leave a comment. I'm not picky.

I do plan on some more work for DasBlog shortly that will require you to provide your identity, but again I will not validate your identity. It is simply an added barrier to avoid automated comment spam.

The fine folks over at TechSmith have made available a beta version of Camtasia Studio 4.0.1 that works on the RTM version of Windows Vista.

I've now successfully recorded audio and video simultaneously to CAMREC and opened the recording in Camtasia Studio for editing.

This makes things a ton easier and I can get to finishing up some projects that I was delaying due to not having the energy to jump through hoops. Now, no hoop jumping.

For reference, here are some of my posts that documented to get journey where I am today:

Recording screencasts within Virtual PC 2007 using Camtasia Studio

Grrrr. Camtasia Recorder crashing on 64-bit Windows Vista RC2

Success with Camtasia Studio 4 on 64-bit Windows Vista RC1

Doh! Still need a Windows XP machine for my Camtasia stuff

Earlier this week I had a customer who shared some strongly worded opinions about how he cannot trust Microsoft because we change things that break code between beta and RTM. In my quick retort, I responded there are two things he can be sure of: he will die, and we will break things between beta and RTM.

My flippant comment got paid back today when I went to restore my information cards from my USB stick into CardSpace on my new Windows Vista installations.

Turns out there is a breaking schema change in the information card between the RC and RTM that makes it impossible to import your RC cards into the RTM CardSpace bits.

That's right ... you'll have to create new information cards. Sad, but oh so very true.

There's been a lot stirring in my head as of late and these are just a few of the things that are in my publishing pipeline:

• Narrated interoperability demonstrations between .NET Framework 1.1 and WebSphere Application Server v6
• How to CardSpace-enable your existing ASP.NET 2.0 web application
• A step-by-step guide to a Windows Communication Foundation solution
• A step-by-step guide to federation with Windows Communication Foundation

And the super secret thingy that you should be really excited about if you're part of the Chicago .NET Users Group ...

• You'll find out soon enough

I'm taking the next week off for vacation as I celebrate Thanksgiving with family. I'll be traveling and not taking my computer, so there will not be any blog updates over the course of the next week.

Of course, I thought about blogging from a café by logging directly into my instance of DasBlog (you know, the old fashioned way of using a username and password) except I forgot to set the new authentication cookie when logging in with username/password credentials.

So, I get a break from everything while I'm gone. I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and hope to see ya when I get back.

I recently had to put together a presentation for a customer on how to perform asymmetric data encryption and decryption using .NET Framework 2.0 and X.509v3 certificates.

The presentation provides examples on how to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify the signature of messages, including how to combine these activities for integrity (signing) and confidentiality (encrypting.)

Knowing there can never be too many examples of this stuff, I've made the presentation available here and the sample application available here.

Last night I finished Gears of War. Simply put, I was disappointed it was over. I even felt cheated. After all, it's only been just over a week of casual game play in the evenings and the casual mode campaign is over. I expected more. A lot more. Maybe the original Halo spoiled me with its plot twist right about the time it was becoming repetitive and then yielded a ton more game play. Of course, the ending of Gears of War was left completely open for Gears of War 2 but it just didn't feel right when it was over. I was sitting there excited for the next act ... and there was none to come. Only the credits.

I plan to return and complete the Hardcore and Insane campaign modes and am looking forward to some online play. But when did we reach a point that a killer title like this can be completed playing only a few hours over the course of a few days in a week?

For years, I've said that the next big thing is wireless power. Of course, I usually meant it as a joke and people would laugh along with me. But check this out.

I just read Jim Allchin's response to journalists and bloggers who claimed he said you don't need antivirus software on Windows Vista.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is to say this ... would someone please, please, please change the style of windowsvistablog.com. After reading Jim's post, the contrasting white-on-blue text has been burned into my eyes and everything I'm looking at right now has "stripes."

I've heard about the ability for your Xbox 360 to blog about you, but until today I had never looked into it.

Endlesscrowd, one of the employees at my local GameStop, mentioned her Xbox 360's blog so I looked into it.

The service is available over at 360voice.com and I've set up my Xbox 360's blog. This is damn cool. I fear what my Xbox will say about me, as I've spent far more time playing World of Warcraft over the past year than I have my Xbox.

I was using speech recognition in Windows Vista RC 2 today to dictate a post that will be forthcoming and notice a little issue.  Because Windows Vista speech recognition was working so well I hadn't touched the keyboard in a while.  Unfortunately Windows Vista detected this as a lack of activity and kicked in the screensaver.  Not to behavior I was expecting.  Let's hope this is fixed in RTM.

By the way, this post was done completely with Windows Vista's speech recognition using Windows Live Writer ... including the insertion of Technorati tags.

From MSDN Subscriber Downloads:

MSDN Subscriber Downloads Service Outage Notification
MSDN Subscriber Downloads will be unavailable from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006, for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable, though downloads already in progress will not be interrupted. We apologize for any inconvenience.

All of the servers here at Casa dé Hambone are getting the RTM version of .NET Framework 3.0 installed today. The Visual Studio 2005 development servers will also be receiving Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation) and Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP.

I'm tempted to go hunting for the RTM bits of Windows Vista so my desktop machine can be on the same development bits as the servers. I'm just not sure I'm into sucking down the 1.6GB download that is the Windows SDK for Vista and the .NET Framework 3.0 along with ISO images for Windows Vista. Furthermore, www.casadehambone.com is hosted within a beta version of Virtual Server that is known to be working with Windows Vista RC2. Do I dare bring the host machine up to Windows Vista RTM?

The F bomb was dropped last night in Gears of War. Not once, but twice. And not by me. By the game. I must admit that I'm surprised by the level of foul language.

I stopped by GameStop this afternoon and scored my copy of Gears of War: Collector's Edition. I had pre-ordered and when I arrived this afternoon, got the last reserved copy of the Collector's Edition they had received in today's shipment.

I'm excited about this one. Mostly because I know nothing about it but was really drawn in by the trailer that I watched from XBOX Live Marketplace. My hope is that it is not another Brute Force which was a real let down.

By the way, another kudos to GameStop for following up with a phone call today to let me know that my copy would be available for sure tomorrow. I continue to enjoy their customer service in this area.

I'll be firing it up tonight after everyone's fast asleep. Maybe I'll see you online!

Take a lesson from Game Stop. Their automated system called me today and left a voice mail. It got my attention right off the bat with, "Attention Halo fans!" Every other automated telemarketing pitch I've ever received on my cell phone was immediately deleted or promptly hung up on.

But here was one that knew exactly what my gaming passion was and followed up with exactly the information I needed to make a purchasing decision right there. Right then.

"Pre-order your copy of Halo 3 today ... just announced ... available in 3 versions. Regular! Collectors!! And Legendary!!!"

Sign me up for Halo 3 Legendary Edition with Halo Spartan Mjolnir Mark VI Helmet right now! I don't even know where I'm going to put that thing. It's huge.

Why was this effective? Game Stop understands my customer profile. They've paid attention to my buying habits. They delivered a marketing message that was tuned exactly to what I needed to hear to make a decision.

I stopped in at my local Game Stop tonight (which, conveniently enough is in the same parking lot as Home Depot, so I was able to mask my trip to "the dealer" under the guise of needing pluming supplies to fix a leaky bathroom sink. Heck, I even took the kids with me. Bonus points for giving my wife a break!)

I was charged only a modest fee for my pre-order. Seemed reasonable enough. Then I had the sense to ask how much, exactly, is the Legendary Edition. "$100 bucks," the cute girl behind the counter informed me. Did I even flinch? Nope. Heck, we even traded XBOX Live gamer tags.

Kudos to Game Stop for running an effective telemarketing campaign that got me to buy not one but two high-end game packages from them. I also pre-ordered Gears of War which is available next Tuesday. Go buy it and look for me online. My gamertag is kevinha.

Got a successful telemarketing story? Share it with me here.

In this week’s edition of HanselMinutes on identity, Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin chat about information cards and Windows CardSpace. Scott gives me mention for the work I did to enable information cards and Windows CardSpace on www.casadehambone.com.

There's some great content about how information cards can (and I believe will) change the way we manage identity overall. Go check it out.

Rather than wait for perfection, I'm making available an SVN patch of my work-to-date for information card support in DasBlog 1.9.6264. You can get it here from the Casa dé Hambone Download Center.

Due to the dependence in my current build on Microsoft.IdentityModel.TokenProcessor, you will require .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio 2005 with the Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects add-on installed in order to open and build the project after applying the patch. Furthermore, you must run this instance of DasBlog as an ASP.NET 2.0 application.

A version of Microsoft.IdentityModel.TokenProcessor that works with .NET Framework 1.1 is forthcoming. As my implementation of information card support in this patch is provider driven, a .NET Framework 1.1-compatible TokenProcessor can be dropped in and the project returned to Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1.

I'm testing out a slightly modified information card login process on Casa dé Hambone.

Previously, I validated your email address in your self-issued card. An email was sent to your email address asking you to click a link to activate your account.

Currently, I'll take whatever claims you provide in your self-issued card and sign you on directly with no need to perform email address validation and no account created for you. In short, your information card acts as form fill mechanism for comments.

What do you think of this model?