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I am sure you are all more than familiar with DreamSpark , the amazing (YES, amazing. Bravo Milo!) offer through which Microsoft gives access to developer & designer tools at no charge. That requires, naturally, to be able to prove that you are indeed a student. Eduserv is a not-for-profit UK-based organization that focuses on IT solutions for the education sector: their identity management solutions are used by over 4 millions of students from universities in UK & other countries. And here comes the interesting bit: Eduserv wrote an identity management component for DreamSpark integrated with their OpenAthens SP , and based on WCF & CardSpace :-) you can read about this on a recently published case study (word document here ). With all the identity talent that runs abundant in the Microsoft offices in UK (Paul MacKinnon & Planky, congrats!) it is not really a surprise to see that they are ahead of the curve, but it is most definitely a pleasure :-) congratulations to all the people involved! Read More...
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Just back from vacation. The tan barely started to fade, and here I am already playing with the new shiny toy :-). Did you experiment with Zermatt by now? As Kim mentions the samples (and the documentation) are an excellent way to start, and I am sure that blog posts & tutorials will soon start mushrooming here and there in the blogosphere: here I begin my humble contribution with my first technical post about Zermatt . I had *absolutely* no hesitations when deciding which scenario I should tackle first: an active STS which handles requests backed by smartcards . I received asks about from many segments (especially about eID management from governments and high authentication levels for finance) and pretty much from everywhere in the world (especially Europe and Asia): I am really delighted to finally have a chance to give you something about that scenario that you can compile in visual studio, as opposed to the usual whiteboard sketches :-) Before we dive into the code, let me disclaim the disclaimable: as usual, the code you see in this blog is just an example and is by no mean production ready code. My purpose here is to introduce you to new ideas, so I favor readability and clarity over completeness If you consider the definition of best practices as "A technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to reliably lead to a desired result" , I think I can safely say that there are no established best practices yet. Sure, there are some fixed points Read More...
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Ahh, I’ve been looking forward for this post for a looong time. We just made available for download the bits of the Beta of “Zermatt” Developer Identity Framework . “ Zermatt ” is the codename of a .NET framework that helps developers build claims-aware applications to address challenging application security requirements using a simplified application access model. Let me expand a bit on that. If you want to develop applications that take advantage of claims & identity Metasystem goodness in general, Zermatt makes your life easier by providing base classes, controls but especially capabilities & a programming model that take care of most of the plumbing for you. Regardless of the role (IP, RP, subject) or the style (Active, Passive, “ Passive-Aggressive ”), Zermatt shields you from the sheer handling of protocols & tokens and provides you with a great model for externalizing your access logic. For my loyal readers and in general to whoever worked with tokens and cardspace in general, who stormed me with mails since the TechEd EMEA demo and even earlier: this means that we can finally retire historical samples like the SimpleSTS and the TokenProcessor class . Zermatt is a fully supported developer framework that gives you those capabilities and MUCH more. How much more? Below there’s a partial list of the goodies you get: · An HttpModule (the Federated Access Module, or FAM) that takes care of handling the token processing pipeline: fully extensible & web.config-urable, Read More...
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I am now focusing exclusively on identity & services, true, but certain news about former interests of mine are just too good not to share. While evangelizing the web capabilities of WCF introduced in the framework 3.5, one of the most recurring questions was about hiding the svc extension for WCF services. That makes a lot of sense, since ideally a good RESTful URI (whatever that really means) should not give away the technology that is used to handle the resource and should not change when the underlying technology does change. Thanks to IIS7 architecture, it is very easy to write a URLrewrite module that does just that: if you recall the Mix session about MySpace's use of WCF in their REST API, you'll remember that they did demonstrate this (sample code here ). Now you don't need to write that module for the ground up anymore: we just shipped the technical preview of the "official" URLrewrite module for IIS7 . Give it a spin, and thanks to the IIS crew for listening to the REST community! Read More...
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Almost one year ago I briefly mentioned the Biztalk Service SDK, here and here . A new version has recently been made available: you would not believe the amount of new features that were added to it in this timeframe. The main reason of excitement for me is that this new release supports managed cards ! It's a bit late at night here in Redmond and the drowsiness makes me feel less than bright right now, so I better defer detailed explanations to tomorrow (or the weekend). Anyway, for the identirati tuned in, this basically means that the service bus offers a R-STS that will accept, among many other means of authentication, also third party's managed cards. The behavior of the R-STS can be influenced by using the Biztalk Services identity portal , or by management API; you can translate attribute claims into authorization claims (if an incoming claim has a certain value you can issue a token which tells to the ultimate destination that the caller is authorized to perform the call; you can copy the input claims directly in the issued token so that the info is preserved; and so on). "Artist" rendering below: Again, I'll be more verbose in a later post: in fact, I plan to walk you through a sample that will make you hit the ground running exactly with that feature. The managed card support is the feature that I find most appealing ( surprised ?), but in fact there are many other great additions such as X509 authentication, REST management APIs, support for multiple languages ... Read More...
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Well, don't get fooled. I'm not going to make any big philosophical considerations about technology and privacy (though I may do that in the future), but I will talk about the little project I've put together after three gintonics & the MIX party at TAO . I am often on the road. When I am homesick I often open a terminal server session with one of my home machines and fire up the webcam; sometime I am in dramatically different timezones, so it's nice seeing that where I am it is dark but back in Redmond it's just dawning, and similar mellow stuff. Before leaving for Vegas I thought it would be nice to access the image directly, without having to fire up an entire remote desktop session for that. Hence I wrote some code for taking webcam snapshots (thanks Scott for putting together a nice WIA sample ), exposed it via WCF service, generated a certificate on my test CA, wrote a binding that uses cardspace... and I had it working. About 1 hour, during which I also managed to watch some futurama . Once I got to Vegas I was too busy with the MySpace session for playing with those things, but yesterday's atmosphere at TAO restored my playful/timewaster attitude: after the party I made the necessary adjustments for accessing the service from outside, calibrated the UniqueID from the selfissued I want to use for authenticating with the service... and it was done. One hour of distracted development, 30 mins of fiddling with the config file (after abundant party's beverages) and now Read More...
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Yesterday we finally had the session about the making of MySpace APIs . As you'll be able to see from the recording , it was a *great* session: extremely interesting and very informative. It had only one issue: Paul Walker , the architect behind the MySpace API efforts and the key person we worked with on the WCF components of the project, couldn't make it to the conference. Paul has a deep, deep understanding of the REST principles and was the one who envisioned how WCF could have been used and extended for meeting MySpace architectural needs. If you'll ever have a chance to attend a session from him or read anything he writes on this topic, I strongly recommend it. The session was opened by Aaron Sloman, who gave the business background. Back to the very first edition of Mix, MySpace demonstrated some Vista gadgets: the reaction it elicited from the audience was the request of opening the corresponding APIs. Well, just a couple of years later here we are, developer.myspace.com is up and running! Aaron then moved to give the list of requirements for the API of a juggernaut like MySpace, and hinted to the fact that the REST architectural principles and WCF were the solution they found fit for the task after much testing. The main technical delivery came from Haider Sabri , who was involved in the implementation of the project for the very beginning. I won't go too much on the details, since there is the recording of the session publicly available ; anyway, just for wetting your Read More...
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