Quite a bit of stir has been raised about Janrain’s popular .NET implementation of OpenID being written in Boo rather than C#. Personally, I take my hat off to the folks at Janrain who worked diligently to provide this free, open source OpenID implementation. To me the language of the library is inconsequential because I reference it as a compiled assembly and the language never affects me. The spirit of .NET is all about using the best language for the job. To some others, it seems to affect them more.
A band of .NET developers has begun to port the library to C#. I might have dismissed the effort as I wished to support the original author of the code with his attempt at Boo, but I recently learned that the Janrain implementation is retiring due to this upstart C# effort. With that news, I’m throwing my hat in the ring by joining the C# effort. The project site is on Google Code. We also have a discussion board on Google Groups.
My immediate plans are to help port the library to C# as needed and build my ASP.NET controls into their library. We’re excited to be working together on this project, and look forward to making a great OpenID library. We’d like for this library to make it drop-in easy to become an OpenID server (the way my existing controls make being an OpenID consumer).
There has been plenty of talk about InfoCard and OpenID working together to prevent phishing attacks. I am investigating how to make a library that brings an OpenID server and an InfoCard consumer together for any web site in a drop-in fashion as well. This InfoCard addition will probably come as a separate library as it won’t be mono-compatible (until those folks re-implement .NET 3.0). I’ll keep you informed on this blog.
Sounds like an interesting project.