Windows CardSpace News and Announcements

Information Card Deployment Guide Update

2007-08-03T07:33:00Z

An updated version of the Information Card Deployment Guide is now available. Among other improvements, it’s been updated to employ the Information Card Icon. As the original deployment guide announcement said:

So you’ve decided to use Information Cards on your web site… Now what? I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just published a document giving step-by-step guidance to Web developers on what we believe are the best practices for doing this. The document walks Web site developers through two different deployment scenarios: sites exclusively using Information Cards for authentication, and mixed-mode sites allowing the use of either passwords or Information Cards. Examples are given for site sign-in, site sign-up, and handling lost Information Cards, including suggested confirmation text for each of these scenarios.

This link to the document Patterns for Supporting Information Cards at Web Sites: Personal Cards for Sign up and Signing In references the current version and will be updated to point to any future revisions as well. The Sample Information Card Site employs these guidelines and is built using the Information Card Relying Party Resources announced earlier. Enjoy adding Information Card support to your web sites!

Information Card kits now available

2007-06-30T05:30:00Z

We've released two kits to help add information card support to websites. They both implement the Patterns for Supporting Information Cards at Web Sites: Personal Cards for Sign up and Signing In.

The Information Card Kit for HTML is platform-independent JavaScript and CSS code that detects if the client can use Information Cards and provides the corresponding UI support.

The Information Card Kit for ASP.NET 2.0 has additonal .NET code to process the token delivered to the server when a user selects a card.

For token processing on other platforms you can refer to the following open source projects:

Ruby on Rails Relying Party:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/informationcard/
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardruby

Java Relying Party:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/informationcard/
http://www.codeplex.com/informationcardjava

Keep your eyes peeled for similar open source projects for C and PHP. In the case of PHP you can take a look at how Kim Cameron added information card support to his site.

Information Card Icon

2007-06-27T22:35:00Z

We now have available an icon that everyone can use to indicate that their web site or application supports information cards.

The idea is that the icon will become readily recognized by users in the same way that the RSS icon is.

The icon can be found here, guidelines here and an FAQ here.

Information Card Deployment Guide now live!

2007-04-30T19:24:00Z

So you’ve decided to use Information Cards on your web site... Now what? I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just published a document giving step-by-step guidance to Web developers on what we believe are the best practices for doing this: Patterns for Supporting Information Cards at Web Sites: Personal Cards for Sign up and Signing In.

The document walks Web site developers through two different deployment scenarios: sites exclusively using Information Cards for authentication, and mixed-mode sites allowing the use of either passwords or Information Cards. Examples are given for site sign-in, site sign-up, and handling lost Information Cards, including suggested confirmation text for each of these scenarios.

We all owe Bill Barnes, Garrett Serack, and Keith Ballinger, as well as others behind the scenes, a big thank you for making this happen. Enjoy!

Information Card Profile documents on Articles page

2007-03-21T07:09:00Z

For those of you building Information Card software, these documents provide the information you need to interoperate with Microsoft's Windows CardSpace implementation of Information Cards, both at the protocol level, and the Information Card file format level. See the Information Card Profile section of the Articles page.

One-Page Introduction to Windows CardSpace

2007-02-21T02:34:00Z

Now available by popular demand … Mike Jones has written a One-Page Introduction to Windows CardSpace

Third-party developer released CardSpace extension for FireFox

2006-12-12T22:51:00Z

Check out my post at http://fearthecowboy.com and the announcement at http://perpetual-motion.com/kevin

The extension is at http://perpetual-motion.com

g	Garrett Serack \| Program Manager \|Federated Identity Team \| Microsoft Corporation blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/garretts

.NET Framework 3.0 has been released!

2006-12-06T18:27:00Z

The .NET Framework 3.0 has officially been released! You can download the .NET Framework 3.0 components here:

Note, if you are using Windows Vista the .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components are installed by default.

The Readme for the released version of the .NET Framework 3.0 is available here. If you have a previous CTP installed, please be sure to review the uninstall instructions. If you have questions about installing the .NET Framework 3.0, please post your questions to the .NET Framework Setup Forum.

PS. You can find .NET Framework 2.0 here

.NET 3.0 Release Candidate has been released

2006-09-05T23:29:00Z

The .NET 3.0 Framework Release Candidate 1 has been uh, released!

I'll be posting a "New for CardSpace in RC1" document tomorrow, and in the next couple of days, I'll post the samples revised as well. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=19E21845-F5E3-4387-95FF-66788825C1AF&displaylang=en

Note: This is a pre-RTM release. Therefore, do not install these builds on machines you depend on. If you have a previous version of Avalon ("Windows Presentation Foundation"), Indigo ("Windows Communication Foundation"), or pre-released versions of .NET Framework 2.0 installed you must read this before download.

g	Garrett Serack \| Program Manager \|Federated Identity Team \| Microsoft Corporation blog:http://blogs.msdn.com/garretts

Windows CardSpace July CTP Samples

2006-08-21T17:14:00Z

There are now 6 samples for the July CTP of Windows CardSpace available:

Creating Managed Cards for Windows CardSpace
Managed Card Creation Activity
Introduction to CardSpace with Internet Explorer 7.0
Decrypting A Security Token
Simple STS Sample
Windows CardSpace and Web Services

Check them out under the Samples area.

July CTP arrives and Sandbox goes live!

2006-07-17T21:32:00Z

The .NET Framework 3.0 - July 2006 CTP has arrived. This is the build we've been waiting for! The issues with the June CTP have been fixed and if you want to experiment with CardSpace there is no better build to install and play with: we're well on the way to RC1! Garrett and I will be publishing all of our samples targeting this release as soon as they've finished going through our review process.

Accompanying the release of the July CTP, we are happy to provide the www.netfx3.com sandbox, http://sandbox.netfx3.com/. Telligent have extended Community Server 2.1 to include CardSpace support. You can login using a username and password or, if you have the July CTP and IE7 Beta 3 installed, you can use information cards. On the Sandbox site you can:

Create a user account either using a username and password or a self-issued Information Card
Link one or more Information Cards with your user account
Sign-in to the site using your username and password or an Windows CardSpace Information Card that you have linked with your account

Please come and play in the Sandbox with Windows CardSpace!

June CTP Issues

2006-07-09T17:46:00Z

The JUNE CTP release of the .NET Frameworks 3.0 presents two known issues with CardSpace:

1. There is a failure to validate some SSL certificates. This failure causes the CardSpace user interface to briefly flash and disappear[NW] and the following message will be written to the application event log:

The description for Event ID ( 259 ) in Source ( Microsoft.InfoCards.Diagnostics 3.0.0.0 ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: The recipient certificate specified is not valid or trusted.

Inner Exception: The X.509 certificate CN=www.fabrikam.com, OU=Domain Control Validated, O=www.fabrikam.com is not in the trusted people store..

To work around this problem, the user needs to import the relying party certificate into the TRUSTED PEOPLE store. Note: This bypasses the Certifying Authority and puts the responsibility on the user to determine the validity of the certificate. This should not be done on production systems.

2. There is a fault in the CardSpace service that causes it to improperly shut down when idle. Subsequent to this the CardSpace user interface no longer launches, and the service must be terminated using the task manager in order to allow the CardSpace user interface to properly function.

Welcome!

2006-06-05T23:50:00Z

Welcome to the Windows CardSpace community website! Our goal is to make this site the best possible source of CardSpace information on the web. MSDN is where you find formal product information, Channel 9 is the place for cool media and CodePlex has shared source code projects. Here you can find and contribute to articles, samples, tutorials and guidance and we'll link to everything related to information cards that we think you'll find useful. We've created a new CardSpace forum on MSDN that is mirrored on the Forums tab; when we want to create a video we'll put it on Channel 9 and link to it. This will be the place where we put our samples and tutorials. And of course we'd love to have your feedback on the site and the product: what's good, what's not so good and what new things you'd love to see (if you don't want to just add them yourself!).

Enjoy!

- The Windows CardSpace team at Microsoft