www.mappoint.ninemsn.com.au

Its no surprise that Frank is pretty switched on when it comes to news about the guys over at ninemsn.com given his history. This time the guys have launched a new maps and directions service based on MapPoint technology. What I really liked about it was the ability to just paste in a block address into the UI and it would try and resolve whatever it was for you. It works! I just got it to tell me how to get to meet my customer in the morning.

Google Maps is all fine and dandy if you live in the US, but currently it doesn’t support Australia. Whereis.com.au would have to have the lions share of the Australian market at the moment for online map lookups, but given it and the new offering from ninemsn.com have a comparible browsing experience it might become a duopoly soonish – especially if the guys over at ninemsn.com can leverage the traffic from their other online properties.

Two user group meets in as many weeks.

I went to the Melbourne .NET User Group and listened to Chris Hewitt do an overview talk on .NET application security. He was talking specifically about SQL injection attacks, some aspects of cryptography and some common phishing attacks that hackers might use to compromise an application.

Martin was next up and gave an introductory talk on Enterprise Library 1.0 – good stuff! Its always fun the visit the “home” user group. Martin has also posted up some resources from his presentation.

This week I am heading to the Hobart .NET User Group down here in Tassie, sometimes being on the road has its advantages

Greg Low joins Readify – welcome aboard Greg!

I just hopped off a plane in Hobart and sync’d my mail, so you can imagine my joy when I saw a link to this URL in my mailbox from Greg Low. I’m really excited about Greg joining the company and I look forward to learning lots from him in the future.

Service Contracts in Indigo

I loved this backgrounder on service contracts in Indigo posted by the man himself – Don Box. I’m really excited about Indigo, its on of the pillars of longhorn that less than its fair share of press, and I think thats because it is content to silently deliver on the promise of a web-services stack baked right into the platform.

Indigo will allow the contract first guys to take the morts of the world with them when designing message exchange patterns and not have to thunk the design down to an RPC mechanism because thats all the current suite of tools allowed.

Nice.