HR 3590 - A Brief Analysis
Before getting started, I want to state that I think it is despicable to have a vote at 8 PM on a Saturday. I am not sure why this would be done, but the reasons I come up with do not make me happy. Possible reasons: To avoid calls from people in their district as the office is closed Hoping some opposed will be unable to show up for the vote The Republicans have a dinner at 8 PM I personally think we should debate this bill, so I am not against voting on starting debate. It just seems a bit underhanded to have votes on a non-work day at a late hour. Will they vote on the final bill Sunday during church, hoping any Senators allied with the Reli

Marie-Alix (a review)
On Tuesday, I saw a post on the Microsoft groups for a query tool called Marie-Alix. I am not generally drawn to people improperly announcing a tool (there are announcement groups), but I figured I would give it a try. This review contains my thoughts about the product. You can download a trial copy at Nob Software. The full version runs $99. First Feelings I am not fond of products with human names. I don’t feel they describe what the product does. It may be from going back a few years where I worked with a developer that named all of his ADO connection objects Fred. Nob Hill has named all of its products with peo

Senate Health Care Bill now released
If you need some help sleeping, the Senate bill was released today. It only weighs in at 615 pages, so it is much lighter than the House tome. Taking a cursory glance, it appears a bit more vague, but I will know more after I read it. http://help.senate.gov/BAI09A84_xml.pdf Peace and Grace,Greg

Geneva Framework is now Windows Identity Foundation
I am now in the process of watching Scott Hanselman interview Vittorio Bertocci and Stuart Kwan on Channel Line Live (@chlive9 on twitter). They are discussion the new Windows Identity Foundation. This was formerly known as the Geneva Framework. Essentially, the “Foundation” is used for claims based access, which we also see termed, in MS docs, as federated identity (an identity that goes across multiple applications or even organizations). There are two pieces you can add to the Foundation for your applications: Active Directory Federated Services 2.0 and Windows CardSpace 2.0. The first is more for internal federation of identity, while the later is a more public fed

New betas emerge from PDC
Every year at the different Microsoft events, we see a plethora of new developer software. This year is no exception. Here are some bits you might be interested in (all leading edge, many bleeding edge): Silverlight 4: It seems like just yesterday he was a baby. This one only works in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, so don’t even try in VS 2008. The biggest bonus here, for most developers is the rich set of controls, the RIA services and the ability to use the same code on the desktop and with Silverlight (I have to try this to believe it, but