New Site

Well, I tried the evaluation of Squarespace and really liked it, so I'm moving my site to here for now.  Who knows how long I'll be staying here :)


I do like that I was able to import my blogs from Blogger easily, and if I move I'll be able to export them as well.


I love that I'll have one site that I can send people to for pictures, blogs, etc.  Much easier than trying to keep track of several different services.  Another nice plus is there's an iPhone/iPad application for updating and maintaining my blogs.

War Memorial Stadium in Greensboro

Great article about the fate of the War Memorial Stadium in Greensboro.


http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/Articles-c-2010-04-14-204711.112113_Wrecking_Ball_Swings_Toward_War_Memorial.html#123


I think it's a huge shame that such a historic stadium is going to be torndown. I agree completely in letting the Coliseum manager have the stadiumand the 1.3 million dollars and see what he can do with the venue. Or youcould even just give him the $500,000 he asked for to build an outdoorarena, and the War Memorial, and if things don't work out you still have$800,000 left over.


Hate to say it, but we told you so.

More iPad musings

Well today I didn't get the iPad below 80%. Not from a lack of use, I think its because I really didn't watch any videos today.


On a different note, I finally started to setup my new site on Squarespace. I had a little bit of trouble, but when I started doing refreshes after I made architecture changes things started to show up like i expected.


I am going to switch my online photos from Picasa back to Fotki because I find that Fotki having folders is a very nice feature to organize my albums with.

iPad observations

After the second week of using my iPad I'm still loving it. The battery life is freaky, it's not often that a battery life claim is actually LESS than reality. With the iPad vie only ran the battery down twice below 20%, the first time was the day I got it, the second time was yesterday while I was working on building a RC tank for someone and was watching movies all day on it. Both times it h it 20% around 10 pm after a full day of use.

The apps are a blast, I especially like plants vs zombies and We Rule. Hopefully they will get the server issues worked out with We Rule soon.....

Books are simply wonderful, I copied all my ebooks from my iPhone and my mac onto my iPad, so I can read any of my books whenever I want :)

I am rather disappointed with the policy of the SDK, I honestly don't see how it really benefits anyone to prohibit third par cross compilers and libraries as long as they adhere to the API.

I honestly don't have many sites that I can't use because of the lack of flash. It seems Ike most of them have implemented alternate pages with HTML 5 instead.

Oh, and by the way this is my first blog post that I've written on my iPad ;)

Great application for waking up in the morning on the iPhone

I heard about this application on the AppSlappy show and thought I would give it a try. The application is called 'Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock' and costs .99 cents in the app store.

I've only tried it one night so far, but I have to say I'm impressed. What the application does is use the accelerometer in the iPhone to detect your movement, and what state of sleep your in. You set what time you want to wake up, and the program will take your sleep state into account before it sets of the alarm. I woke up in a good mood, and other people actually commented on it this morning when I got to work. My brother gave it a shot as well and he said that it seemed to work well for him too.

Here's a link to the website http://www.lexwarelabs.com/sleepcycle/ and I'll be interested to see if it continues to work as well as it did the first night.

Bank of America is awesome!

I've really enjoyed banking with them since I switched to them last year. I decided to go with them because they seemed to be the most technically savvy bank I looked at.


After a years experience with them, I have to say I'm very pleased. They've continued to add features to their website that actually adds value to my online banking experience. After experiencing some fraud a few years ago, I also really appreciate the alerts I can set up on my account to watch for transactions over certain amounts.

Tonight I was paying a bunch of bills, then buying some tickets to a hockey game in March. I was pleasantly surprised to see that BOA was noticing the unusual pattern of charges and put a hold on my account until I could verify them. Usually I pay my bills over the entire month, but I had some surplus this month so I paid all of them early tonight.

It was a very simple but secure process to verify I made the charges, and to lift the temporary restriction. This really gives me a lot of peace of mind after having close to $15,000 in charges made on another account before I found out and called the bank to stop the charges.

I highly recommend Bank of America!

Great tip for using IIS logs for troubleshooting

Got this great tip for making it much easier to use IIS logs for troubleshooting client problems. IIS logs are notoriously hard to read, and can generate a large amount of data very quickly.

A developer on another team gave me a great tip. First make sure that your capturing the query string in the IIS logs. Then when users run into an issue have them go to the very end of the URL and type in 'ihadanerror' and hit enter. This will get logged and make it easy to find when they had a problem.

Such a simple tip, and it's made such a huge difference in the usability of IIS logs.

Authentication and Security in BCS

Wow, can't believe this is my last session, seems like just yesterday I was doing the first post. It's been an awesome week.

Presented by: Nazeeruddin Mohammed, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

Agenda

  • Quick recap of BCS
  • Talk about the context
  • BCS Supported authentication
    • Users Identity vs Impersonation
    • Identity Federation through SAML
    • Identity Delegation

His goal is to explain and demonstrate the different types of authentication supported by BCS to connect to external systems.

4 major pieces in relation to this subject:

  • SharePoint
  • LOB/External services
  • Design Tools
  • Office Applications (BCS Client using the COM)

Cool graph of authentication versions in the slide deck at this point.

User Identity versus Impersonation

  • PassThrough – Uses the logged in users identity and passes it to the external data source
    • Problems with double hops
  • RevertToSelf – Uses the identity of the process that's running the BCS service to access the external data source
  • SSS (Single Signon Service) – Credentials are retrieved from a secure Identity store. It's been improved quite a bit in this release. SSS returns a token back to the BCS process.

Let the demo's begin J

Users Identity and Impersonation

Demonstrating how a double hop doesn't work creating a regular External List. To fixe it he goes back to the External Content Type. He will use a set of credential from SSS to authenticate with SQL.

Adding a credential to the Secure Service Store.

Once a credential is created, then it must have the password set. Set the authentication mode to Impersonate Custom Identity, and then enter the SSS secure ID. When writing things into the BCS store, it is cached. A timer refreshes periodically.

SSS can be used to impersonate an Identity.

Identity Federation Through SAML

Uses a Secure Token Service to get a users SAML token. You can configure it to use another STS, not just the one that is deployed in SharePoint.

There is another piece, the external data source has an STS as well, and they must communicate and share Tokens and verify them, then It gets another token.

Authorization in BCS

  • Rights
    • Edit – create, delete, update metadata objects
    • Execute – call external systems
    • Set Permissions – Give permissions to other users
    • Selectable in Clients – Accesible clients

Identity Delegation

Extending BCS

User is in a browser, and is trying to access data from SharePoint that goes to back end data. User requests data, BDC sends the user to the login page for the security provider (Live Login). Then the provider sends a token back to the application which will allow the user to access the external data.

Cool demo, he's showing how to connect to Netflix through SharePoint.

This is fairly complex, not going to try and take notes.

Another good slide near the very end showing a summary matrix of BCS authentication matrix.

RESTful interfaces to SharePoint 2010

I finally saw an excellent demonstration in earlier sessions about what REST is and why it's so good.

Why Rest?

  • Natural for SharePoint Data
  • Item == Resource
  • Uniform Interface and addressing scheme
  • Low barrier of entry, interoperability

Why ADO.NET Data Services

  • RESTful conventions & frameworks for data
  • Builds on top of standard AtomPub
  • Exactly the sort of convention that is needed
  • Consistent tools and client libraries

Uses just HTTP for connections

Uniform URL convention, very flexible URL syntax

Multiple representations – use regular content-type negoation or JSON and Atom for full AtomPub support.

Allows you to retrieve data with filtering, sorting, pagination, and it's filtering it on the server to reduce traffic.

Once again he's starting in on examples in code, I like these kinds of presentations.

ADO.NET services is nice to be able to generate the proxies to access data.

Very important, you must access the data asynchronously.

Demonstrating using REST with Silverlight for UI.

We can use VS 2008 with ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2 and allows us to start using it with MOSS.