Today I installed a virtual machine with Windows XP to be able to evaluate Groove 3.0 Beta. I am really convinced about the future of this tool and even it integration in the next operating system, at least the ideas behind. It will sign the end of the shares has we know them for today, and for sure more than that. Groove team made a huge effort on the interface I have to say and the gui is user friendly now. The speed even for a beta running on a virtual machine seems also to be far better. Still working with COM or do they switch to .NET?

There is already a good review from Stowe Boyd

I checked a bit what I can find in Longhorn concerning that Biometric stuff. And I found that it is BAPI: bapi.dll, . That specification was bought some long time ago from i/o software and I remember that it was planned to have this integrated in Windows XP. I think that Microsoft did not included it because the biometric technology was not ready at that time.

I know a bit more about BioAPI than BAPI, but at the end I think it works almost the same. There is also a <strong><em>Kernel Biometric Service Provider</em></strong>: kbsp.dll and a tool called biotool.exe permiting to enroll a new biometric credential:

During the last Tech Ed in Barcelona I met Ron Jacobs during his presentation of the <b>"Microsoft .NET Reference Building Blocks"</b> on Friday afternoon. That was really a good presentation of the main Building Blocks. Btw I like this idea of Building Blocks and will use most of them in my next release of my web site: <b>Tech Head Bothers</b>. He was kind enough after I made some pictures for him to let me go on stage to make a picture with him showing the web site in background. Cool !!!<br/><br/><br/><br/>Continue the good work with your team!!! And if you want some more pictures of your presentation just contact me.

I finally installed Longhorn and was looking around what was new and found a new service called "Biometric Resource Manager". What a surprise for me, they finally decided to do something in that direction. Nice!!! I worked on that subject in my last company and dealt with algorithms but also with Windows login replacement (ah gina!!! I had so much fun with you), embedded systems, Web authentication... I will for sure follow this story. Is there any publication on that topic?