Michiel van Otegem
CODE Author
Michiel van Otegem is Senior Software Architect at Sogeti Netherlands. He started programming at age 10, and has nearly 20 years of professional experience as a developer and architect. As a pioneer in ASP and ASP.NET, Michiel still has a strong focus on the Microsoft platform, but he combines that with extensive knowledge of integration and security.
Michiel is the author of several books in Dutch and English, starting with Teach Yourself XSLT in 21 Days (SAMS) back in 2002, and most recently contributing to Programming Microsoft’s Clouds: Windows Azure and Office 365 (Wrox).
Michiel enjoys sharing his knowledge through books, articles, and speaking at conferences and user group events. He also loves to learn, especially life lessons from his two children.
Articles Authored
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Connecting Your Windows 8 Apps to Facebook or Twitter with OAuth
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - May/June
If your users access your apps through social media, you’ll want to know all about OAuth. Michiel shows you how to connect with ease and speed using this protocol.
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Windows Azure Active Directory
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2014 - March/April
Michiel van Otegem explains Software-as-a-Service by comparing various online products and shows you how to store information about users whether you use Active Directory or Windows Azure Active Directory in the cloud.
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Getting to Know the Identity of .NET 4.5
Last updated: Monday, October 6, 2025
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - September/October
Michiel van Otegem argues that .NET 4.5 marks a paradigm shift in identity and access control by integrating claims-based authentication into the core framework. He traces the evolution from the old IIdentity/IPrincipal model to the ClaimsIdentity/ClaimsPrincipal approach, enabled by Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) concepts embedded in mscorlib. Claims—key-value assertions about users—allow fine-grained, policy-driven authorization via ClaimsAuthorizationManager and custom authentication/authorization components, decoupling security rules from business logic and supporting flexible identities across networks and cloud environments.
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Log Users in to Your Web Application with OpenID or OAuth
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2013 - January/February
Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.
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Enterprise Reporting with Excel
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2007 - January/February
When it comes to analysis and reporting, managers love Excel. Just give them the raw data and they have a field day. For enterprise-level reporting, however, you want everybody to have the same data and the same interpretation of that data. With some effort this can be achieved without having to say goodbye to Excel.
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Creating Skinned Controls for ASP.NET
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2004 - January/February
Skinned controls make a user interface very flexible.With skinned controls, the functionality and the presentation of a server control are effectively separated, making it very easy to change the presentation of the control. If used properly, you can use skinned controls to change the look of an entire Web site by just selecting a separate set of skins.
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Creating ASP.NET Custom Controls with Style
Last updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - September/October
Having a custom control display properly is a challenge in itself.Getting your custom control to behave the way you want it to is only half the work. Once you get to the visual side of things you have to create the logic that generates the actual HTML shown in the browser. If you want the control to display properly, this can be a tedious task, especially if you want it to render properly in different browsers.
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XQuery, the Query Language of the Future
Last updated: Wednesday, August 31, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - May/June
XQuery will likely become the dominant language for querying data from most data sources.Although designed for querying XML data, you can use XQuery to tie together data from multiple data sources. In that respect it is much more powerful than SQL, which will slowly but surely be replaced as the main query language.
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Review: ASP.NET Web Matrix
Last updated: Thursday, October 9, 2025
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2003 - March/April
Michiel van Otegem presents ASP.NET Web Matrix as a freeware, Microsoft-backed tool designed to demystify ASP.NET for developers coming from ASP, offering an easy, integrated environment with ready-made pages, drag-and-drop controls, code builders, and a light local server (Cassini). He emphasizes its community integration, rapid setup, and emphasis on prototyping and learning, while noting shortcomings for enterprise-scale development and collaboration. Van Otegem suggests it’s ideal for beginners, freelancers, and small teams to experiment and prototype before moving to Visual Studio for larger projects.
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An XML and XSLT Shopping Cart
Last updated: Thursday, November 24, 2022
Published in: CODE Magazine: 2001 - Issue 2
Systems built with XML and XSLT can often provide much more flexibility and cross-platform functionality than other approaches.Michiel shows us how to build a shopping cart application that's simple, yet highly extensible, and in the process teaches us a few practical uses for these exciting technologies.