Hi Jamie,
As a newbie to .NET, I am curious as to your belief that the key to .NET is centralized authentication through Hailstorm.
I understand how valuable Hailstorm would be to Microsoft (and could they have come up with a more frightening name for authentication what a great marketing concept that has been, didn't they know they were supposed to call it CreamPuff?), but I am not sure I understand why you can't have .NET services built that don't require Hailstorm at all. At the trivial level, for instance, my silly xml-rpc searcher for the ACS (or ACS-like systems) is, I think, a perfect service for a .NET client to use, and offers much value (I think) and yet has nothing at all to do with Hailstorm.
Using the .NET distributed computing pieces (or their clones), or the CLI/CLR/JIT and their clones, why can't perfectly reasonable and valuable services be created that have nothing to do with Hailstorm? And if we do use those parts, how are we contributing to Hailstorm or getting screwed by Microsoft?
I admit that when Java came out, it took me a great while to "understand" why it couldn't be just compiled down to bits. I thought it was a language first, and "java the weltanschauung" second, and I gather that was Microsoft's argument too.
Would you clarify your point?
Thanks,
