Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM

• An Introduction to OpenID

  OpenID, which describes itself as "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity", has been gaining momentum and getting press in the Identity 2.0 space. The fundamental idea of OpenID is that a URI is necessarily unique and thus a good way to identify users. If you say you own a URI and can properly authenticate with the URI, then you must be who you say you are. Admittedly, this can be tricky to understand at first. Perhaps the best analogy is an open version of Passport, where you can download and run your own Passport server. When you go to Microsoft.com or MSDN, you don't log in to a "local" account - you are instead redirected to a Passport (now Windows Live ID) screen to enter your username and password. From a user perspective, OpenID is not that different as Simon Willison showed in this his screencast (embedded below). Scott Hanselman also discussed OpenID on a recent Hanselminutes and has a number of good resources (including the screencast) linked... Posted Feb 15 2007, 09:06 AM by Tim with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, .NET, Video