Windows "Geneva" makes us safer!

Today I attended a webinar by MS by Jan Alexander; Must say he did a good job explaining what it means to developers (myself) and the rest of the world to making identity management and more safe on the internet. "Geneva" basically is a concept where all certificates (SSL or otherwise) have just "more" involved behavior; its "claims based" so ... for example, if you were using windows "geneva" to visit a website. You could view other claims other users have made against that site to decide if its safe or not. However, from this concept, I see some inherent flaws with this as well, given the users claims could be falsified but, with geneva, its supposed to tie into a centrally managed system at passport (microsoft live) and such, not sure if thats exactly a good thing or trustworthy.  I guess we'll just have to trust microsoft anyway right? I mean if you can't trust microsoft, who can you trust? well, thats it, Im heading to bed, I'll write more later. -- JB

Flex isnt it fun?!

Just recently did this site for my security group; took me only a few minutes with code publicly on the internet already prep'd... Since I already knew a bit of both Flash and Flex, it wasnt hard to implement.

 

Now to customize!

 

A sports organization CMS in ASP.net

I decided, what would be best for this sports organization... a very simple content management system; and using my new found love... RewritePath in .net.  RewritePath allows me to take basically ANY url that I can map to asp.net to anything I want, its the cheaper alternative to the expensive methods out there. So Im developing this project (as I will post more screenshots later today) with the management backend, allowing the user to manage all aspects of the sports site.

Observer Patterns in code(vb.net/C#)

I decided if Im going to blog, I'd share what I do everyday, I develop mostly, I do application and network security (physical as well) ; (manage the integrity of my employers network and basically a developer evangelist as well; Of course thats not all I do, but we'll save that for later....)  So anyway, I attended a recent webinar by Microsoft's Zain Naboulsi (excellent presentation btw), gave me some very important coding disciplines; Why re-invent the wheel right? What does this exactly mean... Take the recent election as an example, what a great way to end the election, to learn how it would programatically work using the Observer pattern. The Subject in this observer pattern would be The Voting Location and the Displays (each person who wishes to use the information or update the information) would be the Observers. Its such a great design pattern. Many projects of mine that I'm working on would benefit from this Observer pattern, an aviation website (zapva.com) the Subject would be a particular VA, and the observers would be displaying the data in multiple locations or an aggregate display like the frontpage of the zap site.. Other sites I'd say this could be used great for would be mailing lists, data updates like sharepoint portal (like) sites. Any application that could utilize updates that rely on data from others. What a great thing... I've attached a copy of the zip containing the presentation information just incase anyone else hasnt heard about this design pattern. Yes, for the political programmers out there.. this is for you. slides available here..

ZAP! Instant Virtual Airline

A new website I've been working on in collaboration with a few virtual airline groups out there; I've decided I'd make a website thats better then the rest.. Developing using .net technology as the base, and using Ajax with Adobe Flex (I really enjoy Flex now).

 

I added a new chat area today;  thought that'd give it alot to go on with pilots and virtual airlines so they can chat, and because Microsoft has discontinued its official means of Chat using the MSN Zone (Flight Simulator) is no longer listed in their games directory, kinda sad because theres still thousands of Flight Sim enthusiasts that are actively seeking places to fly.

 

This is one of the reasons I made ZAPVA, besides working with a few of the VA's out there ; giving them a database'd fully functional place for them to collaborate their VA experiences.

 

Some screenshots of the ZAPVA base; You'd be surprised how far an access database can go... The limits are endless. (yes the whole system uses a single mdb) and its high performance. zero complaints yet.

 

The ZAP VA page is still up for grabs, I am tryin to come up with features and elegance... It's very important to make that page the very best as the VA's, and managers/pilots will be using those pages regularly.