Rating:  - Book is a little light in real information...
This book was a little light in practical information, as could be expected for a pre-beta book. If it were my money, I would wait and buy the MS Press Introduction to .Net My Services coming out this spring, since it will be based on the latest spring code release of the .NET My Services SDK. Hailstorm, or .NET My Services, does sound like a great idea, and I am looking forward to finding out more when the beta SDK goes public. That code will probably be more useful to a developer than the code in this book.
Rating:  - Great Geek Stocking-Stuffer - Six Holiday Stars
Imagine a personal profile (personal database) with your mail, calendar, contacts, application settings, wallet and eight other services plus an unlimited number of web services done by third parties that is maintained centrally by Microsoft as a completely open platform for any certified web services developer to use for authentication, user setup, communications routing, chat, payment authorization and execution, etc. - a giant Mrs. Gates cookie to replace all others! That's HailStorm.
An alpha release called HailStorm in a Box, or HSiaB, is available now for developers wanting a head start. HSiaB runs only on your LAN with your HS server doing the work of the future Microsoft server. It's free on the Microsoft web site. HS is all implemented in SOAP and XML of course. HSiaB requires Windows 2000 and SQL 2000 and each of these is free in a trial version from Microsoft as well.
This is bleeding edge stuff and the name "in a Box" is reminiscent of the early (1994) exciting days of browsers when many of us got "Internet in a Box" from Spyglass, the holder of the first Mosaic commercial license. HSiaB is not a revolutionary event like Mosaic, but it is very significant.
The book is a quick 203-page guide to HSiaB with plenty of coded examples. This is great fun for the serious geek even if you hate the name Microsoft. You can pick it up and finish it in one sitting since the code can be comprehended without actually running it. Installing HSiaB (fully explained in the book) and running the code will give hours more of fun. Think of something so new that you actually do some setups from a command line. Bill must have hacked this together himself. Way to go, Bill!
Imagine getting excited about something like this during the holidays. I must be sick. I picked it up at 5:30 AM this morning and could not put it down.
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