Back to the Old House

The imminent end (for this year, at least) of British Summer Time gives me the luxury of an extra hour to spend as I see fit this weekend. So, permit me to use some of it to tell you that I've had a great week. Leaving Avanade and returning to my old role at Marshalls was definitely the right decision. I feel stress-free for the first time in many months. 

It's not just that I've realised my mistake and gone back to a place where I was happier - the situation actually feels better than it was before. We have some new blood in the team, bringing a new set of skills and ideas that could prove to be a shot in the arm. We have a new set of challenging projects facing us in the upcoming months and years. We have new hardware, and of course with the release of VS2005 and SQL2005 this week we now have a new set of technologies that we're aiming to target soon. It's an exciting time.

In the short-term, I'm focussing on some R&D tasks surrounding the use of ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 on some potentially large development / integration projects. Great fun, and if we pull it off it could be quite unique in the market sector. I shouldn't really say more at a high-level, but I'll be sure to blog about any technical stuff I stumble across that may be of use to others.

For instance, did you know that it's perfectly possible to share an ASP.NET FormsAuthentication cookie across multiple websites, running on totally different machines? So, for example, you can log into app1.foo.com and share this with app2.foo.com. Just be sure to set up identical settings in the machineKey and forms configuration settings in web.config (see this MSDN article for more info), and to set the Domain property to the top-level domain when storing the HttpCookie. Bob's your uncle. Sweet.