DotNet OpenId

This C# OpenID library adds OpenID 2.0 Provider and Relying Party support to your web site both programmatically and through convenient drop-in ASP.NET controls.

Go to article:

http://code.google.com/p/dotnetopenid/

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID
by Erick Schonfeld

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

ASP.NET: How to Integrate Both Google Checkout and PayPal In 3 Steps

Trying to get Google Checkout and PayPal to work with a custom .NET site or solution has been a problem for as long as they’ve been around. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be a daunting task, and sometimes even if you do know what you’re doing! Well, I am going to take the guesswork out of this chore once and for all, as I have recently discovered the ultimate way to integrate these payment gateways into your website.

The Solution
In their documentation, PayPal and Google Checkout both mention that you must put their code into your site exactly as they have it, using the HTML forms they way they have structured them. This is not true. There are only a few bits of information that are required, and so long as they are present in an acceptable fashion, your pass-off to these gateways will work smoothly and flawlessly.

1. Get rid of your form tags.

2. Create image buttons for Google Checkout and PayPal

3. Create your hidden inputs to transfer information to PayPal and Google Checkout

4. BONUS: Hook up Google Analytics.

Complete article: ASP.NET: How to Integrate Both Google Checkout and PayPal In 3 Steps

eBook, Self-Publishing, Starving Writers Gain Ad-Supported ePublishing

eBook, self-publishing, on-demand publishing - these ideas have been proposed for a dozen years.

Rather than sell books, can an author earn enough from advertising to compensate his/her sweat equity?

The Writing Ecosystem

Ten years ago, BLOSM (i.e. By the Light of the Silvery Moon) analyzed the book publishing funnel. In rough figures, 10 million authors have the ability and would like to be published. 100,000 get published each year. 1,000 make more than $10,000 per book. The rest earn a small advance.

The ecosystem fails authors, publishers, and the reading public. Only book retailers, with full rights to return unsold books, benefit.

How the Internet Changed Writing

Today, the publishing business is still centric around selling a bound volume. Internet success stories include:

• Amazon extended the life of Long-Tail books through on-demand publishing and a huge inventory of titles.
• Amazon has gained traction with the Kindle. Sony has had some success with their eBook reader.
• Bloggers have gained fans and tested ideas through their blog; and won publishing contracts as a result. Problogger has reported on his and other successes as a book author.
• Hundreds of top writers have blogs - to extend the marketing of their works beyond the publisher efforts.
• Thousands of great writers have published online, gaining millions of fans. But, at eCPM of $1.00 or less from CPC ads, these popular writers have not been able to sustain via advertising alone.

BTW, ebook is green. We save trees; gasoline to drive to the library or the book store; the massive waste to move books from forests, to print shops, warehouses, retailers, and a home; and equal waste to recycle or dispose of old books. If you prefer the form factor of a book, for the sake of the environment, buy an iPhone or an eReader.

The Ad-Supported Book Model

An author and his friends approached tEarn with the idea for ad-supported books. Rather than ads that clutter the pages of his work, exitmercials appear between the chapters of a work. Sample works online include the classic works of Jane Austen and some non-fictional works.

We extended our exitmerical features to support the effort. This includes better display on an iPhone as an eBook reader (i.e. 10 million and growing) and large screen TV's (i.e. 26% of home users) where one can read while sitting in the comfort of a couch.

• At estimated mature value of $0.30 per adpack view and a 10 chapter book, we estimate that each reader is worth $3.00 gross. This beats the royalties of less than $1.00 earned through book publishing.

• With just a few thousand readers, success of the model beats the advances available through publishing. Thus, niche non-fiction and fictional works can benefit - without print.

• Further, the model scales. Works can become best-sellers scaling through the Internet to reach millions of fans. Low-friction access to content requires no credit-card commerce. Great works can be supported solely by advertising revenues.
  

Can Exitmercials Support Starving Writers

Can high eCPM exitmercials support starving writers?

We're monitoring the results with this group of authors. Success brings benefits to both readers and writers without friction. Let's wish all the best.

To learn more, visit http://onlinepublishing101.blogspot.com/

WebResource.axd ?

If you are a developer who works extensively with COM controls, you might find this article useful in addressing some of the key issues that you may face while developing controls. Previously, in Microsoft ASP.NET 1.1, if you wanted to deploy static files such as .html files, .css files, image files, and script files by using a COM control, you had to create an installer and bundle these files together with the COM control. Although this worked, it presented many problems while deploying the control. For example, you may have had problems with version conflicts, with making sure that files such as images were deployed to the same location, or with corrupted or deleted static files that could cause the control to fail.

Web Resources in Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 addresses these issues by letting the developer embed these resources in the assembly as .resources. To access these static resources, you can just call a method in the control's code.

Working with Web Resources in ASP.NET 2.0

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910442

ASP.NET Cookieless Feature Works

Our site was getting HTTP 302 errors and causing a major performance hit on our server.

The cause was in our web.config file.

We were setting cookies=AutoDetect which was causing multiple 302 errors.
Setting cookies=UseCookies solved our performance issue.

AutoDetect uses 302 to try to get additional information on the browsers cookie support.

See attached MSDN doc for the "Understand How the ASP.NET Cookieless Feature Works"

More...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479315.aspx