There have been several people requesting help using the Yahoo! Address Book web services in the .NET Developer Forum. People are getting 403 or 404 error codes back.

I did some digging into the issue this morning and the cause for the 404 error turns out to be an invalid URL for the DOCTYPE declaration for the returned XML data. In short the URL http://l.yimg.com/a/lib/pim/r/abook/xml/2/pheasant.dtd set as the DOCTYPE for the resulting successful web service call XML data is invalid.

This causes problems when using the Yahoo.Authentication class methods, such as GetAuthenticatedDataSet(), resulting in a 404 when the .NET XmlReader attempts to validate the data against the DTD.

The way to work around this issue is to use your own XmlReader with custom XmlReaderSettings specifying to ignore the DTD.

The plug got pulled on OAuth this week in several places, including Twitter and Yahoo!, with Twitter taking a lot of heat on the subject.

Yahoo! is now allowing users and developers to authorize applications, but with some additional messaging letting users know that their data may be at risk if they continue. The main idea here is obviously that developers can still continue their work while the protocol level problem is resolved.

Additional information

Yahoo!’s OAuth Update #2

OAuth acknowledgement of issue

Details on the issue from the advisory

Here’s a quick rundown of the items covered during the initial Mix09 keynote. View keynote.

General

SuperPreview

Beta available today.

Allows you to compare the rendering of a web page in different browsers. Supports both local installations of browsers and a cloud-based service to render in other browsers.

Read more on the Expression Blog.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Shipping today.

http://www.asp.net/mvc/

http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet

ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010

Even better IDE for C#/VB and web developers.

Web Platform Installer

http://www.microsoft.com/web/

Version 2.0 beta available today. Now allows web applications to be installed along with any dependencies.

Azure

• FastCGI/PHP and .NET full trust
• SQL Data Services
• .NET Services

Commercial release this year.

Silverlight 3

Two surprises from left-field: Out of Browser and Multitouch support!

Current Numbers

• 350+ million installations
• 300,000 Developers & Designers
• 200+ partners worldwide
• 200+ Microsoft Products and Websites
• 10,000’s of apps globally

Silverlight 3 Media Enhancement

• GPU hardware acceleration
• New codec support (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4)
• Raw bitstream Audio/Video API, use .NET to access stream data
• Improved logging for media analytics

IIS Media Services

• Free for IIS
• On-demand smooth streaming
• Live smooth streaming
• Edge caching
• Web playlists
• Bit-rate throttling
• Advanced logging

Silverlight 3 Graphics

• GPU acceleration and hardware compositing
• Perspective 3D
• Bitmap & pixel API
• Pixel shader effects
• Deep Zoom improvements

Application Development

• Deep linking, navigation and SEO
• Improved text quality (ClearType)
• Multi-touch support
• 100+ controls available
• Library caching support (finally! Like a Global Assembly Cache for Silverlight)
• Eclipse Support for Silverlight (on the Mac)

Silverlight 3 Data

• Data-binding improvements
• Validation error templates
• Server data push improvements
• Binary XML networking support
• Multi-Tier REST data support

Out of Browser

Run Silverlight applications on the desktop for both Windows and Mac.

• Extend media experiences
• Companion applications for your website
• Lightweight data snacking applications
• Simple consumer friendly experience
• Safe, secure, sandboxed environment
• Built-in auto-update support
• Build offline-aware applications
• Integrate with underlying operating systems

Download Size

Total size: ~4.4MB. 40k smaller than Silverlight 2!

• Thousands of new APIs
• Hundreds of new features
• New codecs
• Out of browser support

SHIP DATE

• Single beta planned
• Ship later this year
• Silverlight 3 Beta
• Expression Blend 3 Preview
• Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008
• IIS Media Services

Expression Blend 3

Be sure to watch the keynote by Bill Buxton. Great energy and view on design.

View keynote

View Interview

http://www.billbuxton.com/

• SketchFlow
  • Flow diagram for different parts of an application.
  • “Wiggly” controls. Working controls that look like conceptual prototypes.
  • Free viewer application to view “sketches”.
  • Supports multiple options.
  • Supports displaying transitions with animations.
  • Supports giving feedback. Notes and drawing on the sketches directly. Send to Blend and view in context.
  • Export to Word to auto-generate documents for clients.
• Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator import
• Behaviors
• Designing with data
• Source code controls
• XAML, C# and VB code Intellisense

I finally found some time at work to update the Silverlight Developer Center on the Yahoo! Developer Network and it was just pushed live. It’s always great to get stuff out the door.

Check it out at: http://developer.yahoo.com/dotnet/silverlight/

Read the official announcement.

Embedded Automation's mControl for WHS currently installs an unsecured application under the Default Website in WHS. My recommendation is to immediately make sure that you've turned on requiring authentication for the mControl virtual folder. However, turning on authentication makes it harder to access the web version of mControl from within your local network, such as from an iPhone or UMPC. The solution is to create a second web site under IIS on the Windows Home Server.

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