patterns & practices has published a new App Block: Authorization and Profile.

This block is a reusable code component that builds on the capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Framework to help you perform authorization and access profile information.

You can read it online or download it.

I posted yesterday that I’m reading over 200 blogs these days. Those aren’t Scoble numbers (is he over 700 yet?) but there sure is a lot of noise. It reminds me of when I first joined Microsoft – there was so much information available and I wanted to read it all. So I went through several cycles of signing up for a bunch of distribution lists, getting to the point where I wasn’t really reading them, then removing myself. I think I’m at that point for reading blogs.

I’ve cut my list of feeds down to just 20 technical bloggers, though 6 of them are .NEAT teammates or architect evangelists in the field. I’ve also subscribed to a bunch of community feeds, the main MSDN feed and the MSFT Download Center feed.

I don’t plan on keeping my list of bloggers this low. 20 just seemed like a nice round number to start. There is so much interlinking that with the 20 I picked, I feel that I’ll still find out about the important posts without having to read so many entries. I do know that I’ll subscribe to any teammate or field AE who starts blogging, because I like to keep up on what they’re blogging about. I think that for other new blogs, I’m going to create a “tentative” category. Then I can get a feel for the blog before deciding to keep them. Of course, I can delete feeds anytime, but having a tentative category helps remind me of my level of commitment to reading the blog.

So David Chappel is blogging. No, not that David Chappel.

I’ve seen David speak at several MSFT events – both internal and external. He’s great. Only downer is that he’s using Blogger which doesn’t support RSS. But Web2RSS has created a feed for him.

I downloaded and installed the new NewsGator trial in a VPC to see how it looks. Maybe I’m still getting used to this whole Outlook news reader thing, but I don’t understand why NewsGator continues to flatten my OPML hierarchy. RSS Bandit, SharpReader and intraVnews all respect my hierarchy. I may not read as much as Scoble, but I am reading over 200 blogs these days and I like to categorize them. Favorites, GDN Workspaces, .NET bloggers, MSFT bloggers, Blogs I only scan the headlines of before I delete them, etc. But when I import that same OPML into NewsGator, it gets flattened into one big list of feeds. Apparently, you can manually move the folders around once they are created, but I’m not interested in doing that 200+ times.

Too bad, because the online services looked cool.

My teammate Simon has posted details of his managed SDK for Outlook codenamed Niobe. He’s also created a GDN workspace for it. Coolness.