TheArchitect.co.uk - Jorgen Thelin's weblog

• Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider

Windows Live ID Commits to Support OpenID

Beginning today, Windows LiveT ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!

The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.

• Quantum Encryption

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a recent scientific conference in Vienna.

• Visual Studio Snippet Designer Tool

The Snippet Designer is a Visual Studio 2008 plug-in available through CodePlex which enhances the Visual Studio IDE to allow a richer and more productive code snippet experience. This plug-in provides an editor and search / explorer for code snippets, integrated inside of the IDE.

This is the tool I have been waiting for for ages!

• Origin of the Term Resource-Oriented Architecture

I got so fed up with people misquoting the origin of the phrase "Resource-Oriented Architecture" that I have corrected the facts on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_oriented_architecture

History of the term ROA

The first published use of the term "Resource Oriented Architecture" was in a presentation by Jorgen Thelin entitled "A Comparison of Service Oriented, Resource Oriented, and Object Oriented Architecture Styles" [1] (pdf) delivered at the OMG Web Services Workshops in February 2003 [2] and April 2003 [3].
A lively follow-on debate on the subject occurred in a set of blog postings by Mark Baker and Jorgen Thelin during February 2003. [4] [5] [6] [7]

Drop me a line if you know of any earlier public usage of the term "Resource-Oriented Architecture"
http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/feedbackmail.html

• Stack Overflow Launches

The Stack Overflow Programmer Q&A site from Joel Spolsky (the guy behind the Joel on Software blog) and Jeff Atwood (the guy behind the Coding Horror blog) has come out of private beta, and is now publicly available for everyone to access.

• CodePlex now supports Subversion (SVN)

Support for Subversion (SVN) has been the most frequent feature request from CodePlex users, and today it has been added by popular demand.

• Five Years At Microsoft

It is hard to believe that it has been five years since I relocated to Redmond and moved to a job at Microsoft. I don't quite know where the time has gone to, but September 8, 2008 was my fifth anniversary at Microsoft -- and the service award trophy arrived from my boss to prove it.

Looking back, the move and acclimation to the new job, company, culture and country were more challenging then originally anticipated, but I would make exactly the same decision if given a do-over.

In case you are wondering, the trophy is made of "optical crystal" with a coloured band across the middle. They are designed by Hybrid3 Design in Seattle, and produced by glass artist Steven Weinberg.

The trophies get bigger at each major service anniversary and have different colored bands -- blue for 5 years service, green for 10 years, red for 15 years and yellow for 20 years service.

More details about the history of Microsoft's service awards are posted in this blog post by Adam Barr: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2006/01/upgrade_to_the.html

• Spore Arrives - DRM Copy-protection is a Bug not a Feature!

The much anticipated Spore game is available today.

If you do actually manage to get past the setup problems and error 5024 initialization issues, then it is actually quite a good game!

• First Day Back to School

Comment made by my fifth grade son when he arrived in school for the first day back after the long summer vacation:

What is that disgusting smell? ......... It's the foul smell of "education"!

• Experiences Relocating to the USA - The New Beginning

Many people have asked me about my experiences of relocating from Britain to the United States to start a job at Microsoft in September 2003, so I have written down some advice and guidance based on how it worked for my move -- in the hope that this may help others. Part 1 - A New Beginning

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 2) - Moving Everything

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 2 - Moving Everything

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 3) - One-Way Ticket

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 3 - The One-Way Ticket

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 4) - Culture Shock

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 4 - Culture Shock

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 5) - Building a US Credit History

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 5 - Building a US Credit History

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 6) - Buying a House

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 6 - Buying a House

• Experiences Relocating to the USA (Pt 7) - Learning to Shop

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 7 - Learning to Shop

• Experiences Relocating to the USA - Was The Move Worth It?

Some advice and guidance based on my relocation move to the USA in September 2003. Part 8 - Was the Move Worth it?

• Updating My Weblog Feeds

Apologies if your RSS reader is showing lots of updates for items on my Weblog RSS / Atom feeds at the moment. I'm making a few updates to the weblog templates to clean out some cruft elements and tidy things up to make the pages and feeds more cross-browser / cross-reader compatible, but that may show up as republished entries in some RSS readers.

• Path to .NET 3.5 Developer Certification

If you are trying to figure out the new certification exams for Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) or Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) for .NET Framework 3.5 / Visual Studio 2008 then you may be interested in a diagram that I put together to helped me to visualize the path through the required certification exams.

• PDC 2008 - Live Platform: Identity Services

There will be lots of the great sessions at the the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in October and the Windows Live Platform crew will be there in force to share all the latest goodness we have been working on during the last few months.

You can expect some very interesting announcements at PDC that will be of great interest to anyone developing cloud applications....

• Office 2007 Interactive Menu Guides

Wondering where your favorite Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Access 2003 commands are located in the new Office 2007 interface? Or just want to interactively explore the rich, new UI design?

The Microsoft Office Team have developed a set of interactive visual reference guide to help you quickly learn where things are on the Office 2007 ribbon-based UI's.

• Clone Detective for Visual Studio

Clone Detective is a new Visual Studio add-on tool available in open-source from CodePlex that allows you to analyze C# projects for code segments that are duplicated across multiple source code files.

• Tools for Agility: A White Paper by Kent Beck

In this whitepaper, Kent Beck share his thoughts on the relationship between tools and agile software development.

• A [W3C] Cool Way to Switch MT Blog Posts from ID-based to Title-based URLs

I finally got enough time to research and work through the detailed steps for switching my Movable Type configuration for this blog over from using entry URLs with entry ID-numbers (eg. /weblog/archives/2008/07/000502.html) to using entry URLs based on entry titles (eg. /weblog/archives/2008/07/managing_and_motivating_developers.html)

There are some neat tricks on how to do this cleanly using URL redirects while keeping your W3C coolness.

• 7 Things CIOs Should Know About Agile Development

Whether you are a CIO, or need to explain agile development to your IT Manager or CIO, then this article is for you.

• Managing and Motivating Developers

Here's a nice article by Esther Schindler about managing and motivating developers, which rings true in so many ways!

• The Legacy of Randy Pausch - Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Professor Randy Pausch died on Friday July 25th, 2008 of complications from pancreatic cancer. Randy Pausch inspired millions of people worldwide through his highly acclaimed "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University.

• Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons

I came across this post by Scott Baradell and some great follow-up comments and discussion about the problems of applying the Creative Commons (CC) license to photographs on the Web.

If you publish anything under Creative Commons, you really should read that post in its entirety to make sure you completely understand what rights and usage you are really allowing by your published license.

• Rumor: Sun Open Sourcing Stock

I stumbled across this post today, which is simply hilarious!

• Delegated Authentication or Delegated Authorization?

Some people think that the Live ID Team accidentally chose the wrong name when we released the Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication (DelAuth) SDK back in February, but in actuality a lot of thought and consideration went into that choice of name.

• reCAPTCHA

With the increasing encroachment of spam bots and other automated programs written to generate spam on the Internet, there are a growing number of occasions when a web site needs a CAPTCHA.