For several years Microsoft has advocated the claims based identity model for more secure access and use of online applications and services. With enhancements to our existing platform, such as Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 and Windows Identity Foundation , we’ve made progress in that...

We have decided to postpone the release of Windows CardSpace 2.0. This is due to a number of recent and exciting developments in technologies such as U-Prove and Open ID that can be used for Information Cards and other user-centric identity applications. We are postponing the release to get additional...

With the release of Beta 2 comes a set of samples specifically targeted towards CardSpace developers. Whether you are a web developer or a C++ programmer, you are sure to learn something new in our CardSpace Geneva Beta 2 Samples . The samples pack covers three broad areas: · A series of incremental...

This Monday, Microsoft made several announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Among these announcements were the official names for the Geneva products currently in Beta. The three components of Microsoft “Geneva” have the following names: · Active Directory Federation...

One obstacle that administrators looking to deploy information cards in an enterprise will inevitably face is getting information cards to their users. Nobody wants to have to send an email to their users saying that in order to access a web service, they’ll need to go to an issuance website and download...

Reducing your login steps one click at a time One of the major goals of CardSpace “Geneva” is to streamline the login process and make it as quick and easy to understand as possible. In the first beta, as Oren outlines in his post , by building the card selector within the Windows-integrated Credential...

Imagine this: you have been following this blog and have decided to try “Geneva” Beta 2. You have gone to the connect site and downloaded the "Geneva" platform components, installed them, configured the server, used the framework to write a claims-aware uber cool application, and set up trust between...

As announced at TechEd, Geneva has just released its Beta 2 bits! These are now available for download from here . There is a lot that is new and updated in Beta 2! Here is a list of some of the things that you will be able to try out and give us feedback on. For additional details on each of these...

For the last several months, the Geneva team (CardSpace, Framework, and Server) have all been heads down, working on getting our Beta 2 out the door. And now, we are finally in the home stretch! Geneva featured in RSA2009 keynote One recurring theme at this year’s RSA conference has been identity...

Hello! My name is Robert Zhu and I am a developer on the CardSpace team. Today, I'd like to invite you on a brief tour of the CardSpace Control Panel Applet. The Control Panel Applet deals with the management of your Information Cards. From this component, you will be able to view, modify, and delete...

In an earlier posts, Colin described how to handcraft a web page to implement the new CardTile feature of CardSpace “Geneva” and Oren points out a way to require user interaction during authentication . This post will now explain how the “Geneva” Framework makes implementing these features quick and...

My name is Oren Melzer and I’m a developer on the CardSpace team. In this post, I am going to talk a bit about the newly designed selector in the new CardSpace “Geneva” beta. Based on feedback from v1, one of our primary goals in designing the CardSpace “Geneva” selector was to give the user a simple...

Hi, my name is Colin Dellow and I'm a developer on the CardSpace team. In Windows CardSpace "Geneva" beta, we've added a visual component to the OBJECT tag that we call the "CardTile." The CardTile shows the user the last card they submitted to a given site or the purple Information Card icon if they...

We’re excited to share news about the next version of CardSpace with you. In this post we’ll discuss the feedback customers shared with us about the first version, the goals we’re working towards, and the work-in-progress beta that you can download and try out today. First and foremost, we’re proud...

When a Managed Card is used, the user must authenticate to the identity provider (IP), in order to get a token. The choices of authentication type are username/password, Kerberos, X509 certificate or a Self-Issued card. Each authentication type offers its own advantages and disadvantages. · Usernames...

One problem with the original version of CardSpace was that it seemed to reject some legitimate SSL sites, but like all tricky bugs, it didn’t happen consistently enough to be caught in the first release. What was going on was that sometimes CardSpace couldn’t validate the intermediate certificates...

It has come to our attention on the Windows CardSpace team that occasionally there are compatibility issues between CardSpace and other applications. One cause of issue is our use of a private desktop. While the private desktop can not be accessed by programs running as the user; a program can switch...

A useful, yet sparsely documented feature of Windows CardSpace is its support for resource side Security Token Services (STSs) – STSs that are used by relying parties rather than Identity Providers. Vittorio has done an excellent job helping to provide detail on this subject , and I highly recommend...

The version of Windows CardSpace that shipped in .NET Framework 3.0 will not run when installed on a FAT file system. We’ve received a surprising amount of feedback (some of the earliest from Pamela Dingle ) that customers are still using FAT file systems and this is causing problems.  This...

The OASIS Web Services Secure Exchange (WS-SX) technical committee has published specifications for WS-Security extensions and policies to enable the trusted exchange of SOAP messages. Their effort resulted in the WS-SX specifications that include WS-Trust , WS-Security policy and WS-Secure conversation...

Hi, my name is Tariq Sharif and I am a program manager in the CardSpace team. After we released CardSpace V1 we received feedback from hobbyists, early technology adapters and site owners that getting/setting up a SSL certificate is hard and it is not needed for some set of their scenario and that this...

Based on feedback from usability studies and CardSpace users we made a number of changes to CardSpace in the .NET Framework 3.5 release. Some of these changes were designed to make CardSpace easier to use. The first of these changes we'll describe are to the page shown the first time you visit a site...