It's since April that I don't write about the book (at the time we released the entire Chapter 2 on MSDN ). Last week I received notice that 2 new reviews were published: one is from the Denver Visual Studio User Group , the other is on Paul Van Brenk's blog . Both reviews are extremely nice, for which we are very grateful; I especially like the fact that in both cases the reviewers perceived our intention to deal with the problem from an holistic point of view, regardless of our affiliation with

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

We are back! I hope you had fun with the STS tutorial I posted yesterday night ; here we move a step further and examine how to equip our STS with managed card issuance logic & UI. As anticipated, this is going to be MUCH faster. If you recall, in the last post I asked you not to delete the Default.aspx page that the new web site template created for you: we are going to put our card issuance UI there. At thsi point the visual studio project should look as follows: The only new element I added

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

On the Seattle-Paris flight. I've just posted the piece about validation-authentication-authorization , and i am a bit bothered by the fact that I was unable to delve into greater details for what concerns the authoriZation part. In particular, I'd like to address one of the misunderstandings which can derive from transporting verbatim the knowledge of Kerberos & "unattended" security in general to the world of user centered identity management. Some of you claimaniacs may find the stuff below

One year ago we had a brief wall-to-wall exchange with Keith about the need of having consumer (as non-developer) info about CardSpace. The Information Card Foundation is doing a great job at handling those info for the general concept of information card. Specifically for Windows CardSpace, I am happy to announce that we now have a consumer friendly home for Windows CardSpace ! I am especially fond of the two videos ( home & work ) from the UK crew; and big kudos to Eileen for the entire effort.

Flying back from S.Diego, after attending a great edition of Catalyst. I should probably write down my impressions before they fade, like it happened with the IIW, but there's in fact something (only mildly related) that bugged me for quite some time and I just want to flush it out of my system before going in vacation (somehow I feel that my old time Italian friends would not appreciate me blabbering about tokens, especially if I do it with my mouth full of focaccia al formaggio :-)). Ok, the story

No, Harry Seldon has nothing to do with it :-) The establishment of the Information Card Foundation is a milestone in the road of a better Internet. In their own words: Information Cards are the new way to control your personal data and identity on the web. The Information Card Foundation is a group of thoughtful designers, architects, and companies who want to make the digital world easier for you by building better products that help you get control of your personal information. See Mike's entry

The power of bookmarklets is still to be seen in many situations. Consider the "Where Are You From?" (WAYF) problem, a common issue with federation technologies. The simple question of where to send the user to complete a federated authentication is one of the more complicated and error prone issues in identity federation. The key metrics for any WAYF solution are that the user should have the opportunity to choose any relevant identity context and the process should be hard for a RP to subvert.

Ahh, terminology: joy and sorrow of our kind. There are some expressions that are very catchy and we use all the time, but that do not always serve well the purpose of communicating our thoughts. Take the usage of "passive" in the context of identity management; we tend to use it every time a web browser is in the picture, but that can be extremely confusing: if you just mean "I am talking about a web app" but you audience understands "he is going to use WS-Federation", you can be sure that things