An observant reader looking at my blog directly and not in their favorite feed reader may have noticed that several months ago the image at the top changed from the skyline of Chicago to that of London. That's because in July my wife and I threw all expectations of decent customer service to the wind and relocated to scenic London England.
A side benefit of this move is that for the first time ever I'll be attending Tech-Ed Europe in Barcelona, Spain. As with Tech-Ed 2007 in Orlando, I'll be working at the "Ask The Experts" booth in the Learning Center. So if you happen to be attending the conference next week stop by and quiz me on Visual Studio 2008, or maybe just teach me to swear in the language of your country!
I'm very happy to announce that our first pre-Beta release of the SharePoint Forms Based Authentication features that the Community Kit for SharePoint Internet/Extranet edition has been working on is available for download on CodePlex. This solution builds on many of the things I created for the version on my website but adds significant improvents in management of users and roles. This solution also gives administrators the ability to approve/deny membership before the user is added to the MembershipProvider database. We still have more to do but we wanted to get this work out into the hands of the public so we can get any feedback you might have as early as possible.
I want to thank everybody who downloaded the source code for the project I created around Forms Based Authentication with SharePoint. The work of the CKS:IEE team supercedes this project in terms of functionality and usability and so I won't be offering any further support of the version I created myself. Basically you're better off using the CKS version as it will continue to grow in functionality and be more stable over time.
This was a group effort and so along with my relatively minor contribution you can thank Zac Smith, Edin Kapic, Brendon Schwartz, and Stacey Draper for making FBA easier and more useful in SharePoint.