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

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

Last week Caleb and I have been surprised in my office by Charles "Carlo" Torre and his camera. The result is an impromptu interview about CardSpace , which is currently on the front page of Channel9 (direct link here ). If you have time, take a look… we laugh a lot, but we manage to make some serious point here and there :-) and of course we mention the book , which is even on the "front frame". I have to remark that I am *always* amazed by Carlo 's skills as interviewer. He provides a fresh perspective,

Ah, the beauty of models. A good model can capture the essence of a system, a phenomenon, anything: it allows you to easily manipulate things, make predictions, transport the knowledge you already have of a domain to a new one. It's just great, and as we will disclose more things about Oslo I am sure you'll have chance to experience this thing first hand. For the time being, let me dig a bit on a model factory we know very well: the identity metasystem. Back in November, during my EU tour , I had

On the Paris-Seattle flight, coming back after 2 weeks spent stuffing myself with all sorts of food with the excuse "after all, you can't find this in USA" :) Before hurling myself back in the vortex of daily work, and celebrate the end of the year with something crazy, I want to take some time writing down some hallucinatory (=vision without execution) thoughts about omnidirectional identities . Be warned, this may be just pointless rambling at this point. Few weeks ago I chatted about this in front

In this post I am going to show you an example of CardSpace and an Office application working together. I know, I still owe you part II of the STS walkthrough ; however I delayed this post for months , and I promised I would have done it this long weekend so I can't really skip it this time. I will write the part II of the STS post in the next days. I don't know about you, but I spend a lot of time working with Office applications: Outlook & Word above all, but also OneNote, Excel... and they

I was recently browsing the home page of http://cardspace.netfx3.com/ , and a post from the forum caught my eye. The main argument is if the display token violates or not the first law, since the STS may decide to use different values in the display token and in the token itself; then there are a number of considerations about security that suggests we may not have done enough for explaining how things work. I am giving myself 30 mins for providing an alternative explanation and address the points

In short: I describe why claims are important for every developer and architect (not just the security expert), and I provide some heuristics for helping everybody to reason about claim based systems. I don't think we did an exceptionally good job in explaining claims based programming and its implications. A lot of the literature on the subject is for security experts, hence it explains claims based programming in terms of the delta that differentiates it from more classical methodologies (ACLs,

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

As the title says, I added few sketches to the post "Credentials vs. Identity; Authentication vs.... what?" . I honestly think they will help clarifying few things: kudos to who managed to read it without anyway :-) and watch out for the racoon!!!