January 2011 Releases of the Identity Training Kit & the MSDN Online Identity Training Course

You can read more details on Vittorio Bertocci’s excellent blog.

You can find the training kit here and the courses here.

The training kit is an update from last June’s and now contain elements about ADFS, Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control v 1.0 (Septembre 2010) and Access Control Lab (Decembre 2010).

The courses seem to be migrated...

Entity Framework Code First CTP 5

I wrote a blog post a while ago about Entity Framework’s POCO capability.  Basically, the current state is that you don’t have POCO.  You have a T4 template to generate classes without EF attributes or base classes, but it stops short of being a real POCO implementation once you start looking at the collections.

Microsoft is working on a...

BizTalk beyond 2010

I recently blogged about the future of BizTalk and the roadmap of the product version Windows AppFabric.

An even more recent blog post shed some light on the topic.

We are planning to invest in the following main areas:

• Deep Microsoft Application Platform Alignment

...

Globalization and web services

I always found that globalization is the poor child of computer literature.  In any .NET book, you won’t hear specifically about globalization before chapter 23.  You can even tell it’s not shooting high on the radar when you look at the ways globalization was implemented in the three main front-end Frameworks of .NET:  WinForm (great!), ASP.NET (retrofitted in sub-optimal way...

First update of Windows Phone 7

The first update of the Windows Phone 7 is coming soon.  Some people say end-of January others, mid-February 2011.

Microsoft has started to release information about the new features.

Not much is known at the moment:

• Cut & Paste
• Faster start-up and resume of apps & games
• Better marketplace search