|
|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » WCF (RSS)
-
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...
|
-
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...
|
-
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...
|
-
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...
|
-
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...
|
-
On the Paris-Seattle flight, coming back after 2 weeks spent stuffing myself with all sorts of food with the excuse "after all, you can't find this in USA" :) Before hurling myself back in the vortex of daily work, and celebrate the end of the year with something crazy, I want to take some time writing down some hallucinatory (=vision without execution) thoughts about omnidirectional identities . Be warned, this may be just pointless rambling at this point. Few weeks ago I chatted about this in front of a microphone with John Udell , digressing along a crazy tangent instead of answering his questions about the book (I eventually came back to Earth and answered properly :)). I don't know if he'll deem those fragments publication worthy, but just in case I'll make a brain dump here. It's not that there's much more to do in this small seat anyway (just finished the latest Eco . He didn't mention underbite at all, I'm happy). Looking back at the activities related to identity in the past year, I am glad to report that amazing progress has been done. Something that makes 2007 very different from 2006 is the kind of work that was made: in 2007 the accent was on execution. The vision behind the metasystem is still being explored, sure, like Kim's series on linkage or the discussions about display token and first law demonstrate; and I feel that conjugating the metasystem and claims in enterprise environment is an area that still need focus (especially in fighting old forma mentis that Read More...
|
|
|
|