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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 a technology or another. Thank you guys! (update: I've just stumbled in another review I didn't know about, on (in)secure magazine issue 17 . Niiiiice). In fact, in the last months various illustrious figures mentioned our book as well: David Chappell , Drummond Reed and Francis Shanahan wrote extremely nice reviews I never mentioned here until now, while I did mention the first entries from Kim and Mike . Add that to the podcast on Perspectives , the interview on channel9 with Carlo & Caleb, the podcast on SearchWinDevelopment , the bonus chapter on codeproject , the extremely nice reviews on the Amazon US page ... and again, mentions from Neil Hutson , Alexander Strauss , Feliciano Intini , Mario Fontana , ... I am sure I am forgetting something (for which I apologize). And now that I begun to hang out at Identity conferences, I can't tell you how pleasant it is to have complete strangers zeroing on you and telling you all sorts of nice things :-) I guess I am easily recognizable Read More...
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Well, I really really enjoyed going to RSA. As I foresaw, more than the event itself I really appreciated the chance of meeting with very smart people: the Concordia and the OSIS events were truly exceptional in this sense. Axel captured some of that spirit here . Just to mention a few notable encounters: I spent some quality time with Pat Patterson , mainly discussing the book. I really really appreciated his honesty and his feedback, he truly read the book with attention and his remarks were always on point: we'll make sure to incorporate them in the next revision of the book, and in fact some of the points he rose are so important that I may blog about them for clarifying. I just loved the chance of seeing things through his eyes, discussing mainly with colleagues carries the risk of falling in groupthink and I feel this was very beneficial for me. Unfortunately we didn't have more occasions of sharing our views, but I hope there will be other chances soon. Thanks Pat! I finally met the famous Pamela Dingle :-) Pam is great, her passion on those matters unparalleled. She gave a great presentation on the IdM, despite it was in the earliest slot the day after the Ping party (great party BTW, thanks Andre'). We had various discussions during the RSA week. For what I can tell she has a clear predisposition to the interface & interactive aspect, while I concentrate more on the protocol angle: that makes us very good conversation buddies ;) Vijay from FuGen showed me a great 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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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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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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[synopsis for the English readers: a financial newspaper in Italy published an article about CardSpace ; I make some considerations about it] Cari lettori italiani, e' parecchio che non scrivo un post nella lingua natia... come e' parecchio che non trovo il tempo di pescare qualche collega italico e immortalarlo per Italia9 ; provero' a fare qualcosa a fine febbraio, ma non prometto nulla :-) Comunque. Oggi sono passato dall'ufficio di Kim Cameron , per portargli una copia del Libro (autografata :-))e ringraziarlo ancora per la sua lusinghiera prefazione. Mentre stiamo amabilmente discutendo come sta andando il libro (bene, grazie!!! ;)) improvvisamente si interrompe ed esclama "ah, I've got something to show YOU". Woah, chissa' cos'e'.. non gli sara' piaciuto qualcosa che ho detto nel video uscito ieri su channel9 e mi vuole bastonare? Si mette ad armeggiare con la stampante e mi porge il printout di un articolo su cardspace ... in italiano! Quando e' passato dall'Italia lo scorso Novembre (Feliciano ne ha parlato qui ) e' stato intervistato da ilSole24Ore, che oggi ha pubblicato un articolo al riguardo . L'articolo e' ben bilanciato, e IMHO riesce bene nel comunicare l'essenza del problema anche ai non addetti ai lavori. Sono davvero felice che una testata prestigiosa come ilSole24Ore contribuisca a portare il problema all'attenzione di tutti e soprattutto dei business decision makers. L'unica cosa che mi sento di sollevare e' lo spelling sbagliato del progetto Higgins ("HiggHins"), Read More...
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This is really flattering! Few days ago I've been notified that I received a nomination for the ID Community Award , a prestigious international recognition from the 2007 edition of the ID People Awards . The awards are given in the context of the ID WORLD congress , an event about all forms of automatic identification: RFID, smartcards, biometrics, data collection . I spoke at last year's edition of the conference, and it was really a great experience. I am very honored to have been considered, and I really want to thank whoever proposed my nomination: all the people competing for the award are incredibly high profile and being among them is, as mentioned, really flattering :-). I would be very surprised if I'd end up with more votes that the other nominees, but I am happy already: I humbly rejoice from this recognition of the work I am doing with electronic IDs , big customers & community. And to think that the majority of the stuff I make in this field is actually a secret... :-) Thanks! Read More...
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Ah finally. I waited for this moment a looong time :-) the first draft of "Understanding Windows CardSpace" is available in prerelease online, on Safari Rough Cuts . More details below. It's already few weeks that our book, " Understanding Windows CardSpace ", showed up on Amazon and in the in-store kiosks at Borders . It's really an emotion to make an ego search and find a book that you wrote , as opposed to books in which you are acknowledged (which BTW is always VERY nice! Thanks to the authors of " Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista™ "," Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications: Essentials for Understanding WS-* "," Web Service Security "," Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed " and " Microsoft® Windows® Communication Foundation Hands-on! Beta Edition " for mentioning me). The manuscript is finally in a shape that allows to give a good idea of what the final book will look like: and while it's true that many figures are still the sketches I made on my tablet, if you are a regular reader of this blog you are definitely used to the style... Hence, we published the manuscript in its current form on Rough Cuts . Rough Cuts is a great service provided by Safari , that can be accessed even if you are not a safari subscriber. In their own words: Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to gain early access to information on cutting-edge technologies, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. With the Rough Cuts service, you'll access Read More...
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[There's not much tech content in this post. You read it all at your risk :-) the next posts will get the technical discussion back on track from where we left it a couple months ago] From the all time record of 17 posts in June, this feed dropped to next to 0 activity in the last 2 months. in fact, I wasn't sleeping at all; but it sounded nice to repurpose Mr .Friedman's excellent opening of " the world is flat " :-) and speaking of World, below there's the trajectory I followed since June. No wonder I'm Freccia Alata . Los Angeles, New York In early July I went to visit some key customers there, evangelizing the new WCF/WF Orcas features few days before the Beta2. James and Ryan did the same with the new web development, Windows Server 2008 and framework features. It was fun! Can't say much about the customers we met: all very interesting, but I have to protect their IP. I loved Roku in L.A. (thanks Mike for bringing me there), but I was seriously turned off by Little Italy in NY (looked like a tourist trap & food wasn't exceptional). Seattle As soon as I got back in the happy Washington state, I entertained my colleagues from our offices worldwide at one internal conference; I spoke about CardSpace and what's new in the 2008 wave (Orcas) for WCF & WF. I was used to come to those conferences when I was working in Microsoft Consulting Services in Italy, and I know how important for readiness those events are. As a result I prepare those sessions very seriously, and this 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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