I am sure you are all more than familiar with DreamSpark , the amazing (YES, amazing. Bravo Milo!) offer through which Microsoft gives access to developer & designer tools at no charge. That requires, naturally, to be able to prove that you are indeed a student. Eduserv is a not-for-profit UK-based organization that focuses on IT solutions for the education sector: their identity management solutions are used by over 4 millions of students from universities in UK & other countries. And here

The latest issue of the Architecture Journal is available for download here (I am breaking the news even before the rest of the pages are updated from issue 15 to issue16: see how much I care about you?;-)). What makes this especially interesting is that issue 16 is entirely dedicated to identity! I have to admit that I've yet to read most of the articles, but I've definitely went through 2 of them: One is an interview/profile with Kim Cameron. It's a nice read, and I am sure you'll enjoy to know

With few weeks of delay I finally forced in my schedule the conclusion of my little getting started series "... using Zermatt" (links to former episodes: setting up an STS for smartcard-backed managed cards & issuing smartcard-backed managed cards ). The first posts I wrote about Zermatt were all about producing identity info: today we'll take a look at consuming those info, something that will be done a lot more (there are only few mints, but an ocean of ways to spend the money they produce)

I was dividing my attention between the Scrubs special on TV & Digg on my PC, when an article titled " Experts: Passwords May Not Be a Good Online Defense " caught my eye: well, couldn't agree more!:-) It turns out that the article is from the NY Times, and it's short & sweet hence there's no need for me to summarize it here: Mr. Stross manages to capture the problem pretty effectively, also thanks to some nice quotes from Kim .     P.S.: I know, I know. I still owe you

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

Just back from vacation. The tan barely started to fade, and here I am already playing with the new shiny toy :-). Did you experiment with Zermatt by now? As Kim mentions the samples (and the documentation) are an excellent way to start, and I am sure that blog posts & tutorials will soon start mushrooming here and there in the blogosphere: here I begin my humble contribution with my first technical post about Zermatt . I had *absolutely* no hesitations when deciding which scenario I should tackle

We are back! I hope you had fun with the STS tutorial I posted yesterday night ; here we move a step further and examine how to equip our STS with managed card issuance logic & UI. As anticipated, this is going to be MUCH faster. If you recall, in the last post I asked you not to delete the Default.aspx page that the new web site template created for you: we are going to put our card issuance UI there. At thsi point the visual studio project should look as follows: The only new element I added

Ahh, I’ve been looking forward for this post for a looong time. We just made available for download the bits of the Beta of “Zermatt” Developer Identity Framework . “ Zermatt ” is the codename of a .NET framework that helps developers build claims-aware applications to address challenging application security requirements using a simplified application access model. Let me expand a bit on that. If you want to develop applications that take advantage of claims & identity Metasystem goodness in

One year ago we had a brief wall-to-wall exchange with Keith about the need of having consumer (as non-developer) info about CardSpace. The Information Card Foundation is doing a great job at handling those info for the general concept of information card. Specifically for Windows CardSpace, I am happy to announce that we now have a consumer friendly home for Windows CardSpace ! I am especially fond of the two videos ( home & work ) from the UK crew; and big kudos to Eileen for the entire effort.

On the Seattle-Paris flight. I've just posted the piece about validation-authentication-authorization , and i am a bit bothered by the fact that I was unable to delve into greater details for what concerns the authoriZation part. In particular, I'd like to address one of the misunderstandings which can derive from transporting verbatim the knowledge of Kerberos & "unattended" security in general to the world of user centered identity management. Some of you claimaniacs may find the stuff below