CRR, User Samples: Almost there

The Resource Center/User Samples upgrades are running a little behind schedule. Although we've been code complete for some time, there are still a few outstanding problems that put us a few days from releasing. Despite some challenges in migrating the old user samples information over to the CRR, we're now in a much better position with almost all site meta-data stored in a single place.

While the CRR already 'exposes' a set of web services to the ASP.NET front end of the site, they're not exactly public-ready yet so we're looking at ways these can be opened up for more general use. Passport is already used to authenticate access to sensitive methods of the service used in the Workspaces File Share area, so that would seem to be the most suitable approach for methods like Update and Vote in the CRR. It's not always trivial authenticating against a Passport web service from a standalone Windows Forms application, so we've still got some investigation to do there.

As this content becomes available as a web service, it should be a relatively easy job creating RSS feeds for the different types of information in the Resource Center. Something else to add to the todo list..