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On a flight from Rome to Warsaw: apparently the droning noise of the plane (or what's left of it after this ) inspires me, and now I finally have the means of pulling out live writer from a pocket and start writing. This time I'd like to explore with you some further consequences of the shift toward claims, and specifically some novel ways of thinking about authorization. The seeds of this discussion are already in the Tao of Claims , but its sheer length makes them accessible only to the very patient reader :-) If you take the time to have a chat with somebody involved in writing software that deal with authorization, you'll likely discover they are driven by 2 main tropisms: 1) stopping unauthorized calls as early as possible in the invocation pipeline and 2) empowering as much as possible the infrastructure guys to specify authorization policies as deployment time options. Both are perfectly sound principles, rooted in the reality of enterprise life: you want to consume as little resources as possible, and you want to be able to translate the company caste system of roles & groups in actual privileges in resource handling. IMHO, however, the view of authorization that those heuristics imply is somewhat crippled and does not exploit the claims system to its full potential. My point is basically rooted on two basic consideration: a) the outcome of an authorization operation is not necessarily just a boolean "yes you can call"/"no you can't call this method"; 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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The idea of using Windows Workflow foundation for driving the UI behavior of an application is a very natural one: in fact, it came out endless times during last year's briefings with the enterprise early adopters and on internal discussions. There was even a major customer that was very serious about it (of course I can't mention the name): I remember last year, at the Boston TechEd, going after the WF and WPF guys on behalf of that customer for finding out what was the situation and feeding requirements. In the end the feature didn't make it into the product, however it has been just released in form of sample . For you that may even be better, in a certain sense: source code and comprehensive documentation will allow you to take a peek at how the product group designed and implemented a kind of workflow that is different from the ones available out of the box (sequential & state machine). Matt from my team has worked hard on this: he gave a session on the subject during this year's TechEd and he just wrote a comprehensive blog post on the subject. Knowing how passionate he is about this, I am sure he will devote more posts to it in the future: I suggest keeping an eye on it ;-) Read More...
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In the last loooong post , the one about using CardSpace together with the new Receive activity featured by the Beta1 of the framework 3.5, I mentioned I would have attached the final solution: however I didn't do it right away, to give some incentive to actually go through the simple steps of the tutorial. Hehehe I know, I'm evil at times :-) I am now attaching the solution in this post: it is not commented nor documented, and it is very rough cut: it is exactly what I built while I was writing the tutorial. About the sample in itself. In order to keep everything as readable as possible I placed the logic for accessing the claims directly in the code activity; that would also happen in a real application, if the actions of your code activity are somewhat infuenced by the value of a claim. However if you'd be performing pure claim validation the right place to put your claim code would be the OperationValidation handler of the Receive activity (explore the properties of the Receive activity in Visual Studio and you'll find it). Thanks Matt for pointing it out 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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