The Freak Parade

This could potentially be a really useful technique for certain kinds of deployment or migration tasks. The article describes a procedure to easily produce scripts to create your database schema and then populate the new schema with the data in your source database.

The article is here

Nice intro to using Mock Objects in .NET – provides some discussion on the two main mock frameworks in addition to an overview and a general idea of why and how to use this useful libraries.

The article is here

Scott has a follow up article on mocks (Mocks – It’s a Question of When) discussing when you would choose to use mocking, which is here

Martin Fowler has an article about the art and science of mocking, called “Mocks Aren’t Stubs” that is also well worth reading.

Random.org provides services that will give you random numbers, or dice rolls, or a variety of other random goodness based off of atmospheric noise. Somewhat more random than the computer can do, in case we ever need such thing.

Random.ORG

If you haven’t heard about OpenID yet, you will. It is an identity federation concept like Passport was meant to be, but it is an open specification, not an implementation. Therefore anyone is free to create and manage an OpenID service and provide OpenID’s. The idea is that if you get an OpenID from some provider, it doesn’t really matter, and the any web application (or windows application for that matter) that supports OpenID can accept your OpenId credentials instead of username / password specific to that application. Eventually it will reduce the number of places you have to maintain credentials. Coupled with Information Cards, it could be a really great thing. We will probably try to support it in our tools soon. This also provides a link to a comparison of various OpenID providers.

The article is here

Here is a very nice, user friendly discussion of Open ID, it’s relation to CardSpace, in the usual Scott Hanselman style…

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScottHanselman/~3/280609393/TheWeeklySourceCode25OpenIDEdition.aspx