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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...
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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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In short: this is the description of a sample that sends a CardSpace-obtained token to an AJAX service implemented with the new Orcas features. Few posts ago I published a tutorial about using CardSpace with Silver. While talking about it with Kushal Shah from the Workflow team, he suggested that it could be nice if we'd also demonstrate how to use CardSpace with the new RESTful capabilities of WCF: that sounded perfect for my "cardspace+<technology_of_choice>" series, hence I promply jumped on the task. The post below documents the results. Preamble Before diving into the code, let's take a moment for understanding what is this all about. The .NET framework 3.5, currently in beta , extends WCF with new capabilities explicitly designed to enable web development scenarios. There's really a lot to say on the subject, however for our context it is enough to say that you can now expose WCF services in ways that makes them extremely easy to consume from web pages. In practice, this mean that you can 1) invoke WCF services via HTTP verbs (POST and GET) and 2) handle messages in web-friendly formats, such as JSON. The macroscopic implication is that you don't need a proxy. Calling a WCF service becames a simple exercise in BLOCKED SCRIPT you gather the data from whatever UI element you need to, you create "by hand" a web request in AJAX style (with the object XMLHttpRequest or the activeXs Msxml2.XMLHTTP/Microsoft.XMLHTTP) and finally you use the results for updating selcted parts Read More...
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In short: this is a step by step tutorial for creating from scratch a Workflow Service with the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio codename "Orcas". The tutorial shows how to secure the service with Windows CardSpace, how to create a client application on the fly and how to access claims from the code of a Workflow activity. Just days before the Earth-moving news at Mix , with the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio codename "Orcas" we made available another silvery technology: the Workflow Services, Silver for friends, are an exciting new technology which allows developers to blend WCF and WF for creating service-aware workflows. As in good tradition, one of the first things I thought about was how to secure those new breed of services via CardSpace: turns out that is incredibly easy, and I could explain it in a 1/2 post if I'd start from an existing workflow service project. However Silver technology is still cutting edge: so I thought it could have been useful to make a full walkthrough. EDIT: after some hours spent writing this post, I've seen that the WF overlord already covered the workflow creation part and in better details: I recommend you checking Matt's post out, especially if some of the passages below are obscure to you. The plan We'll partition the work in few steps: 1. Create the workflow project 2. Add and configure the Receive activity 3. Host the workflow in a WorkflowServiceHost 4. Configure the workflow endpoint for using CardSpace 5. Create a client project on the Read More...
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Periodically I hear people having issues with debugging STS code from CardSpace based scenarios. When you invoke an STS by selecting a managed card, you do that from the private desktop; that means that you can;t access your interactive session until the call to the STS returns, but if the STS code is exactly what you want to inspect you appear to be stuck. There are a number of easy ways out from that apparent impasse: I recently shared those with a colleague, and her reaction convinced me that there's some value in sharing those on the blog. Trick 1 : Put a breakpoint in the STS code, launch your client app and get to the point in which you use the managed card. The dialog of the token request will be stuck, since you have a breakpoint that blocks your RST processing. Just cancel the request and exit the private desktop : you will find the execution stopped at your breakpoint and you can go through the STS code. Obviously if you successfully step through the entire code the token will never be returned, since you killed the client, but if your purpose is debugging the STS you should not care. Easy :-) Trick 2 : Alternatively, you can have the client in a VPC or in another physical machine. Trick 3 : (thanks to Xiao Xie for this one): if you are running on an OS which allows more than one concurrent interactive sessions, such as Windows 2003 or Longhorn Server, just create a remode desktop session on the machine itself. You can run the client from the remote desktop console, Read More...
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In short: I discuss Sidebar Gadgets, and I show you how to invoke a CardSpace-protected WCF service from a simple Gadget. Full source code is provided, along with detailed commentary on the road I've followed for getting there. Added bonus: the code shows how to apply an arbitrary configuration file to WCF, an issue often encountered when hosting WCF code in processes you don't control. Sidebar Gadgets are mini applications which live in the Sidebar, a UI element on the Windows Vista desktop. They are extremely handy for keeping an eye on information you are often interested to; they are also very good at providing you a quick-reach UI for tasks you perform often. As you know I wear the server guy hat, so I'm not really the best person for explaining the advanteges of Gadget: I would suggest visiting Michael and Jaime blogs if you want more details on the subject. When I thought of how the gadget model could be useful for me, I realized that much of the information I'd like to keep an eye on happens to be confidential (like being notified if I received a wire transfer, or getting the access statistics from my website); the actions I want to take when I react to changes in those data are also requiring high security levels (like accessing a portion of my home banking for giving approval for a certain utility bill to be paid). So, would not be great if we could use CardSpace for authenticating the services accessed by a Gadget? I thought for few nights about the issue, devised a Read More...
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If you are watching the Card-space, I'm sure you didn't miss it: the Otto Store smart client application, announced during TechEd Europe and VSLive, is now up and running. You can download and install it from there . This news is relevant to this blog in different ways. The Otto store is the first application available on the internet to use managed cards. It is the first application to secure web services call via CardSpace. And among the customers I have worked with in the last year, Otto is the first one to release a CardSpace based application. Hoooray! It was a pleasure to work with everybody on the project, I can't tell you the satisfaction of seeing all this beautifully coming together. I could fill the entire post just with juicy annedoctes, like the time when me and Jaime (the great guy who dealt with the WPF parts here in Corp) flew in Germany for the first ADS: we took an early cab from downtown Munich to the offices, and it was the very first ride of the very first work day of our extremely young driver. A 20 mins drive became a 45 mins tour in the foggy & frozen countryside around Munich, with the driver increasily panicking: the GPS was banned by his company policy, so I could not pull out my beloved Universal and give him a hand. He was very brave and professional! In the end we did it to the meeting, though with some delay: looking at he app today, anyway, looks like that delay didn't really matter that much. But you're not interested in annedoctes, are you: Read More...
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Dennis and his team just went live with, no pun intended, the all new & improved live labs STS !! While the former incarnation was a pure resource STS, this is a full fledged Identity Provider STS. If you have a Live ID, you can go throught the easy steps of the registration and get your very own live labs managed card. You have a choice of 2 authentication factors: self issued cards and username/password. Youc an then register the certificate of your RP, and you're all set. You can start playing with it from the very start! I am truly happy of this, you can finally get a direct feeling of what an identity authority is and how to incorporate it in your experiments. Unfortunately I don't have much time now to give more detailed instructions, but I'll do that as soon as I have a second. In the meanwhile, please remember: this is a lab, don't expect commercial-grade assurances. Below a screenshot of my indentity selector after the newly imported live labs card Great job Dennis et al! I suspect that there's the hand of Hervey as well :-) Read More...
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