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Verizon Wireless' open network earns praise	28 November 2007
Verizon Wireless' decision to open its network to outside mobile devices and applications has won praise from several groups, including past critics.Verizon Wireless officials announced Tuesday they would open up their network to any devices and software customers want to use by the second half of 2008. Any device that passes a minimal connectivity test will be allowed on the Verizon Wireless network, officials said.That announcement drew applause from a wide variety of groups. Public Knowledge, a consumer rights group that has pushed for open network regulations from the U.S. Congress or the Federal Communications Commission, said it was "cautiously optimistic" about Verizon's decision.Verizon's decision could lead to "a more open network in the wireless industry at large," said Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president. Wireless carriers have fought an FCC decision to require open access on a portion of spectrum in the 700MHz band to be auctioned starting in January, she noted."The Verizon announcement, however, is very limited," Sohn added. "If other carriers don't follow the same model, then consumers will still find their phones tied to a specific technology or wireless company. In order for an open network to become a reality, all carriers will have to participate."Verizon will still decide what phones can operate on its network, she said. Public Knowledge would prefer to have a third party decide what phones can operate on the Verizon network, she said.She also has continuing questions about prices. If Verizon continues to offer its preferred mobile phones at a discount, "then the adoption of the open model will be minimal, absent a rapid decline in cell phone prices," Sohn said. "We need to know whether the rates for Verizon service plans will vary for those with subsidized phones and for those customers with a phone bought elsewhere."Others were less guarded with their praise.Verizon's announcement, combined with the Google-led Open Handset Alliance, is a "significant" step toward the goal of more open wireless networks, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, said in a statement."As I noted when we adopted open network rules for our upcoming spectrum auction, wireless customers should be able to use the wireless device of their choice and download whatever software they want onto it," Martin added. "I continue to believe that more openness -- at the network, device, and application level -- helps foster innovation and enhances consumers' freedom and choice in purchasing wireless service. I am optimistic that Verizon Wireless's commitment along with the upcoming spectrum auction will ensure an exciting new era in wireless technology for the benefit of all consumers."Solveig Singleton, an adjunct senior fellow with Maryland think tank the Free State Foundation, said Verizon's voluntary decision makes more sense than open network regulations, such as net-neutrality rules pushed by Public Knowledge and other groups."Requiring openness or neutrality beyond the basics now supported by demand would needlessly make development far more costly and slow," she said. "A company that wants to invent a new type of phone with cutting-edge features already has a good bit to think about without having to worry about new phones and networks being simultaneously built by everyone else."Many proposed net-neutrality rules would require wireless and broadband providers to treat all network traffic equally, she said."Mandate 'open' and 'neutral' everywhere all the time for everything, and innovation will slow to a snail's pace and network traffic will jam," she added. "Competition between operators to offer innovative combinations of services at special prices would become almost impossible. In this fast-changing context, a regulatory command to treat all traffic all the same is just a bad idea."Also praising Verizon's decision were Funambol, a developer of open-source calendar and messaging tools for mobile phones, and the New America Foundation, a think tank that has pushed for open access rules on the 700MHz spectrumThe FCC and Google deserve credit for pushing the issue forward, said Michael Calabrese, director of New America's Wireless Future Program."This appears to be a move to head off market entry and new wireless competition from Google and other Internet companies that would result if the incumbent carriers were unwilling to meet minimal FCC consumer choice requirements," he said in an e-mail.

AT&T to hike prices on dial-up	26 November 2007
AT&T will jack up its rates for dial-up Internet access by as much as 60 percent on Dec. 1, going well above the price of faster DSL in many cases.Customers who are now charged $9.99 per month will start paying $15.95, and the $15.95 customers will see their bills go up to $22.95, said company representative Dan Callahan; $22.95 is the flat rate for all new customers, up from $21.95. AT&T made the change to be competitive with other dial-up providers, Callahan said. The lower rates are left over from previous carriers that have been absorbed into AT&T, namely BellSouth, he said.AT&T offers basic DSL for as little as $10 per month for new customers, with some conditions. But the dial-up price hike is bad news for some AT&T customers in areas where DSL isn't available. One user complained about it on the forum BroadbandReports, saying he would have already signed up for DSL if he could have. "For a buck less, I could have service that is 15 times faster," wrote the customer, who used the screen name "GorbGuy."Traditional carriers and other service providers have been backing away from their dial-up offerings as more Internet users adopt broadband. With the market penetration of DSL and cable Internet service in the United States at 50 to 60 percent, nearing the percentage of people who have PCs, dial-up is becoming a niche market, said Ovum analyst Mark Seery. Carriers don't like serving that market because, like any large corporation, they're interested in doing one thing, he said."Any time something becomes not the biggest part of what you're doing, it becomes potentially subscale and inefficient," Seery said.In addition, they can't upsell customers to additional services such as video on demand until they're on broadband, he said. And their dial-up customers aren't a captive audience, because there are many competitive providers of the service, due to technical and legal factors, he added.DSL providers have already tried low introductory prices on DSL, such as AT&T's $10 offer, to entice their dial-up customers to switch."I think they think the people who remain on dial-up are not looking to move to broadband," Seery said. "Perhaps the only way to get them to move to broadband is to raise the prices."Competition is the good news for those who want to remain on dial-up. Juno, for example, offers a service for $9.95 per month for the first 12 months and $14.95 per month thereafter. Most dial-up providers include a variety of e-mail, storage, and security features. But even the major competitive ISPs are steering customers toward broadband. EarthLink, for example, offers dial-up at a $9.95 introductory rate and then $21.95 per month. Its broadband plans start as low as $12.95 per month.

Study: Internet could run out of capacity in two years	19 November 2007
Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a study released Monday.A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Internet by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to $137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study , by Nemertes Research Group, an independent analysis firm. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said.The study is the first to "apply Moore's Law (or something very like it) to the pace of application innovation on the 'Net," the study says. "Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years."The study confirms long-time concerns of the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), an advocacy group focused on upgrading U.S. broadband networks, said Bruce Mehlman, co-chairman of the group. The group, with members including AT&T, Level 3 Communications, Corning, Americans for Tax Reform, and the American Council of the Blind, has been warning people of the coming "exaflood" of video and other Web content that could clog its pipes.The study gives "good, hard, unique data" on the IIA concerns about network capacity, Mehlman said. The Nemertes study suggests demand for Web applications like streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfers, and music downloads will accelerate, creating a demand for more capacity. Close to three quarters of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of video in May and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, according to research from comScore, an analysis group.Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD-quality video.Carriers and policy makers need to be aware of this demand, Mehlman added."Video has unleased an explosion of Internet content," Mehlman said. "We think the exaflood is generally not well understood and its investment implications not well defined."The responsibility for keeping up with this growing demand lies with backbone providers and national policy makers, added Mehlman, also executive director of the Technology CEO Council, a trade group, and a former assistant secretary of technology policy in the U.S. Department of Commerce."It takes a digital village," he said. "Certainly, infrastructure providers have plenty to do. You've seen billions in investment, and you're seeing ongoing billions more."U.S. lawmakers can also help in several ways, he said. For example, the U.S. Congress could require that home contractors who receive government assistance for building affordable housing include broadband connections in their houses, he said. Congress could also provide tax credits to help broadband providers add more capacity, he said.Consumers also pay high taxes for telecommunication services, averaging about 13 percent on some telecom services, similar to the tax rate on tobacco and alcohol, Mehlman said. One tax on telecom service has remained in place since the 1898 Spanish-American War, when few U.S. residents had telephones, he noted."We think it's a mistake to treat telecom like a luxury and tax it like a sin," he said.

Video distributor to FCC: Stop ISP traffic 'throttling'	15 November 2007
A distributor of online video content has filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to stop broadband providers from blocking or slowing p-to-p (peer-to-peer) traffic.The petition filed by Vuze, which uses the BitTorrent p-to-p protocol to distribute Web content, asks the FCC to set rules for network management by ISPs. Vuze's filing late Wednesday follows reports last month that cable broadband provider Comcast slows some p-to-p traffic, including BitTorrent.Broadband providers often promote their services as being necessary for watching video online, but then they slow access to a service such as Vuze's, said John Fernandes, Vuze's vice president of marketing. "They say that they're engaging in reasonable network management, but what they're doing is slowing down some traffic," he said.Vuze, which has partnerships with several movie studios, television networks, and PC game makers, wants to start a dialog with ISPs about what kind of network management is allowed, added Gilles BianRosa, the company's CEO. But the FCC needs to prohibit large-scale content blocking, what he called traffic "throttling," he said."The ISPs cannot decide unilaterally what to do with third-party Internet services such as us," BianRosa said. "We need to work with them to design a solution that works and is fair."By blocking or slowing video and other Web content, ISPs are fighting against customer demand for more multimedia services, BianRosa added. "We think that ISPs are spitting into the wind with that kind of approach," he said. "This kind of blocking has to stop."Representatives of two large broadband providers, Comcast and Verizon, didn't immediately respond to a request for comments on Vuze's FCC filing. Comcast has denied blocking Web content, but some broadband providers have opposed other attempts to create rules against blocking some types of traffic, saying they need to be able to ensure quality of service by managing their networks.The FCC has all the authority it needs to "address claims of unreasonable conduct," an AT&T spokesman said. "Broadband providers must have the ability to manage traffic to provide all consumers with high-quality service," he added. "Additional rules or legislation are totally unnecessary."Vuze's FCC petition is similar in some ways to calls by consumer groups and Internet-based firms for the FCC or the U.S. Congress to pass network neutrality rules, which would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors. The FCC has had an open inquiry into net neutrality rules since April, and a push to pass rules in Congress has stalled.But the Vuze proposal is more focused than net neutrality, BianRosa said. Net neutrality often includes other issues in addition to content blocking, including requirements for broadband and wireless providers to allow all legal devices to connect to their networks. Vuze is asking the FCC to "dig deeper" than the net neutrality debate, he said.Public Knowledge, a group promoting consumer rights on the Internet, praised the Vuze filing. Vuze is a good example of the harm caused by content blocking, said Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge's president."Comcast's actions frustrate Vuze's business and force the company to devote resources to play a 'cat and mouse' game with Comcast in order to maintain superior service for its customers," Sohn said in an e-mail. "We hope the FCC acts promptly before even more harm is done to more consumers and to more companies."Earlier this week, a Comcast customer in California filed a lawsuit against the company, saying the provider has caused several Web-based programs to suffer performance problems. In late October, Public Knowledge and other members of the Open Internet Coalition filed a complaint about the alleged Comcast blocking with the FCC.Vuze, based in Palo Alto, Calif., distributes video in partnership with movie studios and television networks including the BBC, Showtime, and PBS. It also distributes PC games, music videos, and audio files. Company officials say the Vuze client has been installed by customers more than 12 million times since the company, formerly called Azureus, rebranded itself in January.

BT and Virgin Media to report broadband slowdown	06 November 2007
Investment or cuts? Whaddya reckon? Analysis Newspaper and City knives are being sharpened for the UK's two biggest internet providers this week. Our major infrastructure owners, BT and Virgin Media, are set to release disappointing results at a watershed moment for broadband.…

Ofcom receiving complaints about Broadband providers	30 October 2007
Many consumers are finding that switching their broadband connection is resulting in severe delays in getting connected and industry regulator Ofcom receives an average of 180 complaints a week about this matter. Over half of all homes now use this high-speed access to the internet and with both O2, the mobile phone provider and the Post [...]

Senate passes seven-year Internet tax moratorium	26 October 2007
The U.S. Senate has passed legislation that would extend a moratorium on Internet access taxes for seven years, giving supporters hope that an extension will be signed into law before the current moratorium expires Nov. 1.The Senate late Thursday passed the seven-year extension on a voice vote. The moratorium would extend the ban on Internet-only taxes, such as access and "bit" taxes on information as it travels through a taxing jurisdiction. The Senate passed an amended version of a House of Representatives bill, the awkwardly named Internet Tax Freedom Act Amendments Act.The House passed a four-year Internet tax moratorium earlier this month. The two chambers will have to reconcile the two versions of the moratorium before sending the legislation to U.S. President George Bush to be signed.The Senate's seven-year extension represented a compromise between a group of senators, many of whom opposed an extension in the past, who wanted a four-year ban, and a second group that wanted a permanent ban.Senators calling for a four-year ban, including Thomas Carper, a Delaware Democrat, and Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, argued that a permanent extension would hurt state and local governments' long-term ability to raise money. Other critics of the ban have raised concerns that a permanent ban would give telecom providers the opportunity to press for tax-exempt status on services such as VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol)."This agreement is a common sense victory both for Internet users and for state and local governments," Carper and Alexander said in a joint statement. "It continues the moratorium on Internet taxation, avoids unfunded federal mandates on states and cities ... and allows Congress to revisit the issue after seven years."Supporters of a long-term ban say it encourages broadband adoption, and, by extension, helps drive the U.S. economy.Senator John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican who pushed for a permanent moratorium, also praised the Senate's action. The amendment crafted by Sununu and Carper, in addition to extending the ban, made some changes to the House bill that were intended to protect e-mail messages and instant messaging from usage taxes, Sununu said.Some critics, including Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, had raised concerns that a Senate moratorium bill would open up e-mail and instant messaging to taxes."This bill -- a drastic improvement over what came out of the House -- makes a clear statement that taxes on Internet access are wrong for consumers and wrong for the economy," Sununu said in a statement. "The Senate has made real progress in the name of Internet tax freedom, passing improved legislation that offers more certainty for this national and global communication network."Wyden, a long-time tax moratorium supporter, also applauded the Senate vote.The changes approved by the Senate will protect instant messaging and e-mail, including voice and video messaging services, Wyden said in a statement."These services have sparked revolutions in our ability to communicate, bringing distant grandparents closer to their grandchildren and giving our soldiers in the field a more direct link to home," he added.

Never mind that '4G' stuff, Sprint now says	25 October 2007
Now that WiMax has been certified as a form of 3G mobile data infrastructure, Sprint Nextel is changing its tune about the WiMax network it plans to launch commercially in April.Last year when Sprint was shopping around for a "4G" technology, it had a lot to say about how 4G would do something 3G networks couldn't. WiMax won out as its 4G network of choice. But in a keynote address Thursday at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment in San Francisco, an executive of Sprint's WiMax business, Xohm, sang a different tune."I think we spend entirely too much time talking about the Gs," said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint. Last week, the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union certified WiMax as a 3G technology, providing a seal of approval many governments require for carriers to deploy it. Wider deployment generally means lower equipment prices, which helps service providers.That's not to say the carrier no longer wants to differentiate WiMax. In his presentation, Gude played up the wide band of spectrum Xohm will be able to use, which he said will cut down on delays for individual users the same way a multilane freeway can move faster than a two-lane highway even when the speed limit is the same. In the real world, a lot of people want to use the network at the same time, he said.But more important is the business model of the two networks, Gude said, characterizing the traditional cellular business as more closed and controlled, while Xohm's business will tap into the dynamics of the open Internet. The company is opening itself up to partners for application development as well as connected devices, he said. The best known of these deals, announced in July, was an agreement with Google to develop a variety of Internet-based services.Sprint hopes a wide range of devices, including cameras, media players, and in-car electronics, ultimately will connect to the WiMax network. Instead of Sprint stores, they will be sold in the most logical places for their device types, such as consumer electronics stores. The first devices to come for Xohm next year will be wireless cards for notebook PCs, which Gude expects to be sold in the computer departments of electronics stores.The company will also have open API for third parties to develop services to run on the network. As an example, Gude envisioned a video portal that users could navigate using the five buttons traditionally found on video players. Xohm will probably charge for some of what it offers to third parties, but its aim is not to stifle innovation, he said.Sprint isn't getting out of its cellular business now that it's starting Xohm -- which it expects to reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of 2008 -- but seems to be looking at it in a different light now."We are a content distribution industry," Gude said. It's just that for most of cellular's history, all the content has been user-generated and consisted of talking.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1)	14 July 2008
The ASP.NET MVC team is in the final stages of finishing up a new "Preview 4" release that they hope to ship later this week. The Preview 3 release focused on finishing up a lot of the underlying core APIs and extensibility points in ASP.NET MVC. Starting with Preview 4 this week you'll start to see more and more higher level features begin to appear that build on top of the core foundation and add nice productivity. There are a bunch of new features and capabilities in this new build - so much in fact that I decided I needed two posts to cover them all. This first post will cover the new Caching, Error Handling and Security features in Preview 4, as well as some testing improvements it brings. My next post will cover the new AJAX features being added with this release as well. Understanding Filter Interceptors Action Filter Attributes are a useful extensibility capability in ASP.NET MVC that was first added with the "Preview 2" release. These enable you to inject code interceptors into the request of a MVC controller that can execute before and after a Controller or its Action methods execute. This enables some nice encapsulation scenarios where you can easily package-up and re-use functionality in a clean declarative way. Below is an example of a super simple "ScottGuLog" filter that I could use to log details about exceptions raised during the execution of a request. Implementing a custom filter class is easy - just subclass the "ActionFilterAttribute" type and override the appropriate methods to run code before or after an Action method on the Controller is invoked, and/or before or after an ActionResult is processed into a response. Using a filter within a ASP.NET MVC Controller is easy - just declare it as an attribute on an Action method, or alternatively on the Controller class itself (in which case it will apply to all Action methods within the Controller): Above you can see an example of two filters being applied. I've indicated that I want my "ScottGuLog" to be applied to the "About" action method, and that I want the "HandleError" filter to be applied to all Action methods on the HomeController. Previous preview releases of ASP.NET MVC enabled this filter extensibility, but didn't ship with pre-built filters. ASP.NET Preview 4 now includes several useful filters for handling output caching, error handling and security scenarios. OutputCache Filter The [OutputCache] filter provides an easy way to integrate ASP.NET MVC with the output caching features of ASP.NET (with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 you had to write code to achieve this). To try this out, modify the "Message" value set within the "Index" action method of the HomeController (created by the VS ASP.NET MVC project template) to display the current time: When you run your application you'll see that a timestamp updates each time you refresh the page: We can enable output caching for this URL by adding the [OutputCache] attribute to the our Action method. We'll configure it to cache the response for a 10 second duration using the declaration below: Now when you hit refresh on the page you'll see that the timestamp only updates every 10 seconds. This is because the action method is only being called once every 10 seconds - all requests between those time intervals are served out of the ASP.NET output cache (meaning no code needs to run - which makes it super fast). In addition to supporting time duration, the OutputCache attribute also supports the standard ASP.NET output cache vary options (vary by params, headers, content encoding, and custom logic). For example, the sample below would save different cached versions of the page depending on the value of an optional "PageIndex" QueryString parameter, and automatically render the correct version depending on the incoming URL's querystring value: You can also integrate with the ASP.NET Database Cache Invalidation feature - which allows you to automatically invalidate the cache when a database the URL depends on is modified (tip: the best way to-do this is to setup a CacheProfile section in your web.config and then point to it in the OutputCache attribute). HandleError Filter The [HandleError] filter provides a way to declaratively indicate on a Controller or Action method that a friendly error response should be displayed if an error occurs during the processing of a ASP.NET MVC request. To try this out, add a new "TestController" to a project and implement an action method that raise an exception like below: By default when you point your browser at this URL, it will display a default ASP.NET error page to remote users (unless you've gone in and configured a <customErrors> section in your web.config file): We can change the HTML error displayed to be a more friendly end-user message by adding a [HandleError] attribute to either our Controller or to an Action method on our Controller: The HandleError filter will catch all exceptions (including errors raised when processing View templates), and display a custom Error view response when they occur. By default it attempts to resolve a View template in your project called "Error" to generate the response. You can place the "Error" view either in the same directory as your other Controller specific views (for example: \Views\Test for the TestController above), or within the \Views\Shared folder (it will look first for a controller specific error view, and then if it doesn't find one it will look in the shared folder - which contains views that are shared across all controllers). Visual Studio now automatically adds a default "Error" view template for you inside the \Views\Shared folder when you create new ASP.NET MVC Projects starting with Preview 4: When we add a [HandleError] attribute to our TestController, this will by default show remote users an html error page like below (note that it picks up the master page template from the project so that the error message is integrated into the site). You can obviously go in and customize the Error view template to display whatever HTML and/or friendlier customer error message you want - below is simply what you get out of the box: To help developers, the default Error view template provided by the new project template in Visual Studio is written to display additional error stack trace information when you are browsing the application locally: You can turn this off either by deleting the code from the Error view template, or by setting <customErrors> to "off" inside your web.config file. By default the [HandleError] filter will catch and handle all exceptions that get raised during the request. You can alternatively specify specific exception types you are interested in catching, and specify custom error views for them by specifying the "ExceptionType" and "View" properties on [HandleError] attributes: In the code above I'm choosing to display custom error views for SqlExceptions and NullReferenceExceptions. All other exceptions will then use the default "Error" view template. Authorize Filter The [Authorize] filter provides a way to declaratively control security access on a Controller or Action method. It allows you to indicate that a user must be logged in, and optionally require that they are a specific user or in a specific security role in order to gain access. The filter works with all types of authentication (including Windows as well as Forms based authentication), and provides support for automatically redirecting anonymous users to a login form as needed. To try this out, add an [Authorize] filter to the "About" action in the HomeController created by default with Visual Studio: Declaring an [Authorize] attribute like above indicates that a user must be logged into the site in order for them to request the "About" action. When non-logged-in users attempt to hit the /Home/About URL, they will be blocked from gaining access. If the web application is configured to use Windows based authentication, ASP.NET will automatically authenticate the user using their Windows login identity, and if successful allow them to proceed. If the web application is configured to use Forms based authentication, the [Authorize] attribute will automatically redirect the user to a login page in order to authenticate (after which they'll have access): The [Authorize] attribute optionally allows you to grant access only to specific users and/or roles. For example, if I wanted to limit access to the "About" action to just myself and Bill Gates I could write: Typically for all but trivial applications you don't want to hard-code user names within your code. Instead you usually want to use a higher-level concept like "roles" to define permissions, and then map users into roles separately (for example: using active directory or a database to store the mappings). The [Authorize] attribute makes it easy to control access to Controllers and Actions using a "Roles" property: The [Authorize] attribute does not have a dependency on any specific user identity or role management mechanism. Instead it works against the ASP.NET "User" object - which is extensible and allows any identity system to be used. AccountController Class I mentioned above that the [Authorize] attribute can be used with any authentication or user identity management system. You can write or use any custom login UI and/or username/password management system you want with it. To help you get started, though, the ASP.NET MVC Project Template in Visual Studio now includes a pre-built "AccountController" and associated login views that implement a forms-authentication membership system with support for logging in, logging out, registering new users, and changing passwords. All of the views templates and UI can be easily customized independent of the AccountController class or implementation: The Site.master template also now includes UI at the top-right that provides login/logout functionality. When using forms-based authentication it will prompt you to login if you are not currently authenticated: And it displays a welcome message along with a logout link if you are authenticated on the site: Clicking the Login link above takes users to a Login screen like below that they can use to authenticate: New users can click the register link to create new accounts: Error handing and error display is also built-in: The AccountController class that is added to new projects uses the built-in ASP.NET Membership API to store and manage user credentials (the Membership system uses a provider API allowing any back-end storage to be plugged-in, and ASP.NET includes built-in providers for Active Directory and SQL Server). If you don't want to use the built-in Membership system you can keep the same AccountController action method signatures, View templates, and Forms Authentication ticket logic, and just replace the user account logic within the AccountController class. For the next ASP.NET MVC preview release we are planning to encapsulate the interaction logic between the AccountController and the user identity system behind an interface - which will make it easier to plug-in your own user storage system (without having to implement a full membership provider) as well as to easily unit test both it and the AccountController. Our hope is that this provides a nice way for people to quickly get started, and enable them to have a working end to end security system as soon as they create a new project. Testing TempData One last improvement to touch on in this first preview 4 post is some improvements being made on the Controller class that allow you to more easily unit test the TempData collection. The TempData property allows you to store data that you want to persist for a future request from a user. It has the semantic of only lasting one future request (after which it is removed). It is typically used for MVC scenarios where you want to perform a client-side redirect to change the URL in the browser, and want a simple way to store scratch data. With previous ASP.NET MVC Previews you had to mock objects in order to test the TempData collection. With Preview 4 you no longer need to mock or setup anything. You can now add and verify objects within the Controller's TempData collection directly within your unit tests (for example: populate a controller's TempData property before calling its action method, or verify that the action updated the TempData after the action returned). The actual storage semantics of the TempData collection is now encapsulated within a separate TempDataProvider property. Conclusion Hopefully the above post provides a quick look at a number of the new features and changes coming with ASP.NET MVC Preview 4. My next post on ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 will cover the new AJAX functionality that has been added, and demonstrate how to take advantage of it. Hope this helps, Scott