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I am delighted to announce a slight change in my role: from now on I'll focus on identity architecture, especially in the context of S+S and cloud services. YEEEEEES!!! If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have gotten the impression it was already the case. Actually, for the last three years I worked with enterprise early adopters and connected systems (WCF, WF, CardSpace). If you ever read a case study on those, chances are I may have worked on the project in some form: I had the chance of working with the best and see a wiiide range of scenarios, I loved it (most recent example here ). It's simply that when it came to blogging I just loved to dig deep in identity topics , then the articles and the book , the sessions , so... I now have the chance of staying on the topic full time. Fantastic :-) P.S.: recently Mike challenged me to surprise everybody and make a post of just three lines (I think he was poking fun at me for the the unmanageable length of this , this and this ). I thought I could do it with this post, but it turns out I am actually unable to... scary :-) Read More...
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It's that time again. Few months ago the Italian government fell, and as a good citizen I am called to the right-duty of casting my vote for electing the new one. There's a little detail, though: while in the past that meant taking a short walk through my scenic little home town and meet few old friends at the voting office, the fact that I am now a resident of the Washington state in USA makes the walk a little too long. Luckily, technology comes to the rescue: I can cast my vote via mail :-). Since it is an interesting exercise in transmitting sensitive data, regardless of the transport, I thought it would be worth to go through it. Friday I received in the mail an envelope with all the stuff depicted below. The two voting slips are the forms on which I can express my preference for our two government chambers. Both slips are realized in thick paper, covered by a lines pattern that prevents to see what was the vote even if held against a bright light. You may think that it is an attempt of guaranteeing confidentiality . The two voting slips should be closed inside the voting slip envelope. Once closed, reopening it will irremediably ruin the envelope thus giving away the fact that the votes were seen or possibly spoofed. Again, you may think of this envelope as a mechanism of enforcing integrity . The voting slip envelope goes inside a preprinted mailing envelope, addressed to the Italian consulate. In the same mailing envelope goes the Tagliando Elettorale, which I loosely Read More...
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Jon Udell recently launched a new interesting format on the website perspectives.on10.net. Perspectives is a series of in-depth conversations with passionate innovators. Most work for Microsoft; some work elsewhere; all are advancing the state of the art in areas as diverse as robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. Information technology is the common thread, and Perspectives appeals to the technically-minded, but the show also aims to tell stories in ways that make sense to a wider audience. Each installment of Perspectives is delivered as an audio podcast, and supplemented by a partial text transcript. The first episode was an interview with two guys from the Robotics Studio team, Tandy Trower and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. The quality of the interview is clearly top notch, the scope of the topics strategic & forward looking but still solidly rooted in technology: Jon's editing makes things flow beautifully, and the transcript is incredibly handy for speed readers & search engines. In short, I LOVE IT :-) Hence, it is with ill-concealed pride that I announce the subject of the second episode : it is a chat I had with Jon back in December , just days before the book came out. The casus belli was the book itself, that Jon was so kind to read in prerelease version, but we ended up talking about identity on a much wider sense. We touched on certificates versus managed cards, omnidirectional vs unidirectional identities, WS-*, openID... Jon is a *great interviewer*, Read More...
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Few days ago I've been notified that the 2nd chapter of our book "Understanding Windows CardSpace" is now available for free online , on the pages of Code Project (takes some time to load from my connection, don't give up). That's a very big chapter, for architects and business decision makers, focused on showing how the identity laws and the identity metasystem are addressing many of the challenges presented in chapter 1. It also shows the role played by WS-Trust & friends . There's not much of Windows CardSpace in this chapter, apart from its positioning as the identity selector that comes with Windows: in fact I like to think that the same text could have been used in a book about Higgins or any of the of the projects in this space. (BTW, Paul says extremely kind things about the book here . Thank you Paul !). Many of the topics in the chapter do not have a natural order of presentation, but they all sort of depend from one another in a way which was pretty difficult to disentangle. Furthermore it is important to introduce all the new concepts in the right context, in a coherent discussion, without forgetting anything important just because you approached the matter form one angle rather than another. To give you an idea of the planning effort it required, I fished from my archives one of my mindmaps for this chapter: Pretty wide, eh? I just *love* MindManager ! See, that's the essence of a discussion I had almost one year ago with my good friend Gianpaolo . We were discussing Read More...
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Our Chinese DPE is translating selected posts of my blog in Chinese! You can find it here . I can't even begin to tell you how honored I feel from the fact that somebody considers this feed interesting enough to go through the effort of translating it... my deepest thanks to the colleagues in DPE China that made all this a reality!!! :-) I'll try to be as interesting as possible And now a word for my Chinese readers... please forgive my horrible grammar 亲爱的读者: 谢谢您的支持与厚爱! 我看 我有多中国读者.我希望你喜欢 翻译 ! Read More...
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It's that time of the year again: the end of June marks the end of the fiscal year, and for us it's time to reflect on what we've done in the past 12 months. Vast majority of the things I've done are internal-only or with high profile customers that can't be mentioned publicly until their PR departments give the green light, hence I won't discuss those here; however I think it's interesting to share with you a summary of some of the things that I worked on, just to give you a measure of how .NET3.0 (especially CardSpace in my case) is relevant. It should give you an hint of how much impact you can have working in my group, so you'll be able to put announcements like this in the right perspective! I also hope that this will boost your confidence that the content of our upcoming book is based on very solid real world experience, earned by working daily with our key accounts in the identity space: the PG intent is tempered by immersing it in requirements from customer actually shipping solutions based on this thing that we call CardSpace. Which, by the way, is the reason for which I'm still at the computer at this time... big stuff is going on in cardspaceland! Projects, Briefings, Deep Dives This year I've worked with or briefed more than 45 enterprise companies on CardSpace/WCF/WF, good part of it at the very top of the fortune100 and global100 (ah, btw: just subscribed to Fortune. I was buying it all the times anyway). Sometimes it was just a 2 hours personalized QA, some other Read More...
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Here there's the cover sketch for our "Understanding Windows CardSpace" book. As you may have noticed, the Independent Technology Guides series has the tradition of putting an animal on the cover. While all the books of the series have gorgeous cover pictures (I especially like the lion on David's " Understanding .NET "), I don't think that there was ever any correlation between the animal chosen and the topic of the book. Well, for our book we tried to keep our choice in context: the racoon, with his mask and reputation (to stay in theme with a recent post , search for "tanuki" on your favorite search engine) seemed a very good candidate for a book about Identity. The guys at AW were very kind and made us happy :-) Read More...
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