No, not alphabet soup... rather a set of cool apps that have a seamless installation
experience and run in the browser. Secure, full power of the platform... i love it.
Karen Corby, a fabulous PM on the Avalon team, wrote a great
post about the security of XBAPs. Chris Sells and I got in a big debate about
how much detail my book should go into this kind of detail. In the end I felt the
deep dive into custom security policy was out of scope for a book like mine (more
about the overall structure and conceptual model of the platform), but an API reference
or deep dive book would be a better place for this.
While they don't appear to have a lot of content yet, XBAP.org looks
like it might become an interesting place to search...