There's lots of buzz in the blogosphere today about the big Cardspace/OpenId collaboration that was announced this morning at RSA. Whodathunk that a technology rooted in the RESTful open source ecosystem could intermingle with a technology built by the WS-* wonks without trigging some bizarre matter/antimatter explosion...next thing you know somebody's going to come up with a tasty combination of chocolate and peanut butter and then it's all down hill from there...

Kidding aside, I think today's announcement is really cool. I'm looking forward to seeing more talk about OpenID around CSD (the Connected Systems Division -- which builds WCF, CardSpace, Active Directory, and other things relating to identity).

I thought Dare's comments on the announcement were particularly apropos to my own personal situation:

I'm glad to see the Web platform teams at Microsoft getting better at watching what's going in the Web developer community and adapting their plans to accomodate them. AJAX, RSS, and RESTful Web Services are all trends that started outside the B0rg cube that the platform teams have embraced after some initial resistance. With OpenID it didn't take as long for us to go through the NIH<->FUD<->Acceptance<->Approval<->Adoption cycle that I've come to expect from my fellow B0rg. It seems we have adapted.

If you're wondering why it's been so quiet on this blog lately, it's because I've basically been spending a lot of my time working on features for NetFX 3.5 that will make WCF play a lot nicer with those three technologies. Given that we've just shipped V1 it's been a pretty quick turnaround, but the team is making some fantastic progress. Omri's already gotten to play around with the bits, and I'm looking forward to getting community feedback on what we've built so far.