8 Years of Blogging

As it is by now tradition, here there’s my annual checkpoint on blog activities (former years’ digests: (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010).

This is my 514th blog post, which sounds like a pretty unbelievably high pile of blabber… until you look at the numbers of certain overzealous tweeters (I won’t add any links here, but if you want to make a search for the latest OkCupid survey about Twitter. J/K guys, of course ). Ah BTW I tweet too, but very little (mostly announcements).

Aaanyway, here there’s a list of the most notable entries in the last 11 months (since I covered May in the last roundup).

• Announced the whitepaper Security Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Applications
• Popular post on sliding sessions with WIF
• Posted on Channel9 the video recordings of the last date of the WIF Workshop tour. The course totalized well over 140,000 views, which is absolutely impressive considering that a good portion of the content is well into level 400 territory
• After a year of promising it, the June 2010 update of the identity training kit finally started featuring slide decks and videos alongside the usual hands-on labs
• The new ACS makes its debut on LABS
• A wild SelfSTS appears! For the ones among you not well versed in pokemonspeech, it’s a nimble utility which simulates a local STS. Paul Schaeflein will pick it up one month later and use it with Sharepoint
• First ACS2 protocols Infographic; updated infographic here
• Programming Windows Identity Foundation extravaganza

• Ebook finally out
• In stock
• Praaaaise

• Introducing.. FabrikamShipping SaaS, the sample with the most moving parts we’ve ever built. A complete end to end SaaS solution, with source code and a live instance on Windows Azure to play with. You’ll see this guy from keynote demos (teched Europe, China) to kiosks at various events (too many to mention).
• Speaking all over the place (the planet, that is), including PDC and presenting the Windows Azure demo at the TechEd China keynote. The PDC session turns out to be the most successful of my career to date, getting the #2 spot for the entire conference. Ego inflates to dangerous levels .
• Joint interview with Giorgio from Il Corriere, major Italian newspaper. Finalmente qualcosa che posso mostrare alla mamma (alla quale del PDC non e’ che interessi molto…)
• Announced the whitepaper Single Sign-On from Active Directory to a Windows Azure Application
• New WIF Runtime EULA
• The Identity Developer Training Course moves from channel9 to msdn
• Goodbye to an old friend
• FabrikamShipping walkthroughs: wrote I and II, III still pending
• The new ACS ships! And with it a boatload of new content
• ACS Extensions for Umbraco, part I, II and III
• Using ACS 2 and OAuth2.0 for securing your WP7 applications: now there’s a lab for that

In term of post numbers, it’s about the same as previous years: 75 posts, last year it was 75 as well. But I feel that it is less that it should have been. This year we produced content not only in extraordinary amount , but also exceptionally packed of good info, practices and reusable solutions. That info is there, and the ones among you who had the time to dive into it are reaping the benefits; however we need to do a better job at highlighting and isolating the important parts. Also, I really miss my philosophical posts about STSes and claims, especially now that our tools make those less abstract and others are finally warming up to the concept (good moooooorning!!!). The bandwidth is what it is and in all honesty I don’t think I could have written more, but I will definitely try to do better.

As usual, I want to thank all my readers. I hope I am providing a useful service, and that you’ll keep forgive my occasional vagaries about gadgets and misc oddities: these days I usually get those out of my system by posting on Facebook, where I harass a much smaller audience, but some time stuff overflows here