Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 2

Continuing on with the theme of messaging additions in Orcas, today I'll look at some more of the protocols and community-driven features that were added.

• WS Atomic Transaction 1.1. Transactions tie together multiple participants in a distributed application. The framework of transactions is built on various coordination protocols between parties. Transactions are a kind of coordination in which either all or none of the parties agree to perform an action.
• Validation for issued token certificates. We've added support for configuring the certificate validation policy for issued token authentication, similar to the configuration for other certificates that are used for service credentials.
• Flowing SAML tokens. We've added support to flow a SAML assertion without having to re-sign the token. This allows these assertions to be handled by proxies without special configuration.
• Using message contents for authorization. We've added support to ServiceAuthorizationManager for performing access checks that make use of the body of the message.
• WS Secure Conversation 1.3. A secure conversation is an exchange of multiple, protected messages. Using a conversation mechanism allows a security context to be established across several messages, which performs better than having to exchange security keys with every message.
• WS Trust 1.3. Building a secure conversation requires that the two parties exchange security credentials. In order to perform this exchange, the two parties need to establish a trust relationship where they can evaluate the assertions made by the other side.

The protocols that I've talked about today and last time are available through the new WS2007HttpBinding and WS2007FederationHttpBinding as updates to the previous web service standard bindings.

Next time: Messaging Additions in Orcas, Part 3