Google demonstrated their Chrome OS again this past week where they indicated the OS will be essentially a gateway to the "cloud". For example, your files would be stored remotely in the cloud, not on a local hard disk.

If you think in terms of our current world where access to the Internet is done through an application on our computers, i.e., the browser, the Google concept for Chrome OS is somewhat foreign. However, projecting forward to Internet access being ubiquitous through many devices independent of a separate application like a browser, the Google OS approach makes sense.

Apple's success with the iPhone stems in large part from it being a consumer focused device rather than something made by techies with an engineering bent. Currently, the PC is still a techie device not a consumer device. The inner workings are too exposed to the user of the device. The Apple Mac computers are a step closer to a consumer device, but still too techie.

If we no longer think about computers as necessary for Internet access, i.e., we just use the services, the Chrome OS starts to make more sense. Is it premature in relation to the current mindset? Maybe, but the thought process behind it is definitely in the right direction.

The 12th edition of the Boston area Code Camp will be on Saturday 10/17/2009. Speaker abstract submission will end on Wed 10/7/2009 so submit an abstract if you want to do a presentation. Also, please register so we can get an accurate count for food. Details are at www.thedevcommunity.org.

Join us for a discussion on ASP.NET MVC the next two Wednesday evening (7/20, 7/29) as well as prior to our August meeting on 8/12. Details on the Boston .NET User Group web site www.bostondotnet.org.

The first Vermont Code Camp http://bit.ly/U1Ut will be held on Saturday 9/12/2009 at the University of Vermont Business School in Burlington, VT. Speaker abstract submission is now open through 8/15/2009. This is a great chance to share what you know w/ fellow developers. It's also a great time of year to visit Vermont and enjoy the beautiful City of Burlington.

While implementing an ASP.NET MVC site which was hosted by an ISP I followed this information from MSFT since the server is running IIS6 and I could not access the web server to configure it for MVC.

This resulted in the following route maps in Global.asax.cs

//Hosted Configuration: Uses .aspx in IIS.
//If MVC installed can map directly.
routes.MapRoute(
"aspx",
"{controller}.aspx/{action}/{id}",
new { action = "Index", id = "" }
);

routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}"
);

routes.MapRoute(
"Root",
"",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);

I then implemented FormsAuthentication using the

[Authorize(Roles = "User")]

attribute on my actions.

However, when the user visited a "page" w/o sufficient permissions the standard loginUrl attribute of the element in web.config did not work.

loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn"

After some thought I realized the loginUrl value needed to follow the mapped routes and changed it to

loginUrl="/Account.aspx/LogOn"

which works nicely.