Took part of the morning off this morning to let the sun shine down on the icy roads. No major incidents getting to work, though the office parking lot is like an ice rink.

• As mentioned yesterday, I finally got my STS implementation working with WCS. Turns out that using WCS with the wsFederatedHttp binding requires you to specify which claims you want to send to the service. In comparison, using WCS with wsHttpBinding automatically requests the PPID claim. It would be nice if this was documented somewhere. I only figured it out by finding this demo from Michele.
• Last week, I said that we need a better tool than SvcConfigEditor. This tool is only marginally better than hand-editing the config files with intellisense. A “real” tool would keep you from building invalid config files. While I appreciate the need for this level of flexibility at the transport layer, we really need a better web service hosting story than IIS + ASP.NET + web.config. WCF makes me long for the days of the MTS/COM+ GUI interface. I never wasted hours troubleshooting config issues with MTS/COM+.
• Apparently, Xbox 360 outsold Wii and PS3 combined in December. That’s probably more of a statement about PS3 and Wii shortages, but there’s no arguing with numbers like 10.4 million Xbox 360 consoles, 5 millions Xbox Live users, and nearly 3 million copies of Gears of War. Congrats to the Xbox team!
• David may be hiding from his blog of late, but he did venture out long enough to point me to SOA Facts. My favorite: Dante has a special level in hell for consultants whose resumes do not say SOA.

It was a little too cold to make a snowman at my house, so we headed over to the big hill near our house for a little sledding. The hill was pretty trashed – we weren’t the first ones to down the hill – but we all had a fun time nonetheless.

Here’s Mommy and Riley, riding together:

And here’s Patrick, riding by himself like a big boy:

Riley calls Patrick “Bubba” because she can’t say “brother”.

And since I promised my teammate Maureen a snowman photo, here’s the last one we built:

On top of all this snow play and sledding, I got my STS working with WCS. More on that tomorrow.