“Geneva” Team Blog : TechEd

Identity Developer Training Kit – Featuring Geneva Framework Beta-2 and other identity products

CardSpaceBlog — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:10:00 GMT

With all the new “Geneva” Beta 2 products introduced at TechEd you may wonder how long it is going to take you to learn these new technologies. Well, the DPE team and the Geneva team thought about this and are happy to offer a developer focused training package, introduced as part of Geneva Framework Beta-2, named as “Identity Developer Training Kit (May 2009)”. This is a training kit for ASP.NET and WCF Developers intended to help them learn about how to build an end-to-end identity related scenario using Microsoft’s latest identity and access control developer products.

This kit contains a set of hands-on-labs, documents, and reference materials and covers the following products:

· Microsoft “Geneva” Framework Beta 2

· Microsoft “Geneva” Server Beta 2

· .Net Access Control Service (March CTP)

· Microsoft Federation Gateway

You can download the identity developer training kit (May 2009) here.

Also, here are links from Vitorrio's blog of the annoucement of availability of these kits, as well as more details.

If you are an ASP.NET developer be sure to check out the “WebSitesAndIdentity” lab which covers various exercises such as how to claims enable an existing ASP.NET application, federating with Geneva Server and LiveID STS from an ASP.NET application, and how to make use of Identity Delegation in an ASP.NET application. If you are a WCF developer be sure to check out the “WebServicesAndIdentity” lab which provides exercises for making your WCF service claims-enable and connecting it with an STS and then adding identity delegation capability to it. There are aspects of Access Control Service covered in this kit as well!

In addition, if you are looking for a site that is full of identity related videos, stop-by at “The Id Element” site – the one-stop shop for all things identity on Channel9. You can watch videos that cover the “what’s new in Beta 2” and deep dive of specific topics on identity products. These are videos covering interviews with the product team members who build these products and would wow you!

Enjoy coding!

Step-By-Step Guides, Virtual Machines and "Geneva" Whitepapers

CardSpaceBlog — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:31:00 GMT

“Geneva” Step-by-Step Guides and Virtual Machines

The Step-by-Step guides and virtual machines that were used at the Tech Ed "Geneva" hands on labs and sessions are now available for download. You should find these helpful if you were unable to get to TechEd, missed the Geneva hands on lab sessions, or just want to be able to go through the material at your own pace. They are a great way to get your hands on and play with the Geneva technology.

You can download these materals from here.

“Geneva” Interop Whitepapers

Also available are our "Geneva" interop whitepapers. These cover:

"Geneva" and Sun OpenSSO

Interoperability between applications in heterogeneous technology environments is essential to successful collaboration between organizations today. Sun and Microsoft are taking interoperability to a new level by utilizing the SAML federation standard in both the Sun OpenSSO Enterprise federation solution and the forthcoming Microsoft “Geneva” Server federation solution.

By standardizing on SAML for federation, Sun and Microsoft enable organizations to deliver collaborative services with ease.

"Geneva" and Novell Access Manager

Despite remarkable gains in IT capabilities and collaboration, organizations continue to struggle with administrative complexity, workforce productivity, and data security. Many organizations support a large number of users—including employees, customers, partners, and suppliers—who seek access to a wide variety of applications and services. This can be particularly challenging in mixed-technology and multiple-domain environments where users are spread across technical and business boundaries.

Microsoft and Novell have come together to solve these challenges and boost cross-organizational collaboration. The two companies are building the interoperability bridges that enable customers to reduce complexity, enhance security, and decrease costs. This paper explains the need for standards-based identity federation, and the current and forthcoming solutions that improve the interoperability of mixed-technology directory environments.

The interop whitepapers can be downloaded from here.

Other “Geneva” Whitepapers

Additionally, for Beta 2 we've updated our "Geneva" Framework for Developers whitepaper and the "Geneva" Datasheet. You can download these papers from here.

What’s New in Geneva Beta 2

CardSpaceBlog — Tue, 12 May 2009 02:52:00 GMT

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 and more, see the release notes included with the Beta 2 package.

“Geneva” Server

· New rules engine for authoring claims transformation policies

· Ability to read attributes from AD, AD LDS, and SQL out of the box, plus pluggable provider model to enable access to other attributes stores

· Group policy-based Information Card provisioning for CardSpace “Geneva” clients

· Support for SAML 2.0 SP-Lite

· Proxy to enable authentication for users on the Internet when Geneva Server is on the intranet

· Scale out via farm and load balancer topology

· Powershell commandlets

· Support for AD RMS

· Utility for federating with the Microsoft Federation Gateway

“Geneva” Framework – IDFX

· Enhanced FedUtil Tool with local STS for easy offline development

· New Visual Studio templates for building claims-aware web applications, web services, and security token services

· Support for SharePoint 2007

· Revised token handlers

· Revised federation authentication module

· New Claims Authorization Manager API

· Updated config support

CardSpace

· Support for Group Policy-based Information Card provisioning.

· Updated management UI

· Updated card tile

· Group Policy-based way for administrator to make card selection decisions for specific sites

Improved provisioning of X509-backed cards
Compatible with most existing managed cards

We are very excited to be able to deliver these bits to you, and to hear your feedback. Please send any technical questions about Geneva to the product team via our forum or support email address. We will continue to announce updates to Geneva on our website and here on our team blog.

“Geneva” at RSA2009 and TechEd

CardSpaceBlog — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:21:00 GMT

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. In Microsoft’s “Moving Towards End to End Trust: A Collaborative Effort” keynote, Scott Charney spent significant time discussing identity. You can watch the presentation here. (from the “Tuesday, April 21” menu).

Scott explained that to achieve end to end trust, we need to provide a missing “trusted people” layer to the trusted stack. The identity metasystem (listen from 21:02) and the “Geneva” platform (listen from 26:31) play an important role to fill the gap.

Geneva will be at TechEd

TechEd is coming up very soon. May 11-15, 2009. And the Geneva team will be there! There will be many sessions talking about Geneva, including two Hands-On-Labs. For a list of sessions, click here. (key word: Geneva) Additionally, we will, of course, have a booth at the expo where you can come by and meet us, or ask us questions.

Please stop by and give us your feedback!

Geneva TAP (Technology Adoption Program) Status

We have been overwhelmed by the amount of enthusiasm and the number of the very compelling applications to join our TAP. It was a very difficult process to try to choose the right set of varied scenarios and customers to support. We wanted to try to cover as diverse a set of different usage scenarios and customers as our team could support. But now, I am happy to say that our TAP program is underway. In the coming months, the things we learn from how these customers are deploying and using Geneva should find their way into a set of best practices and templates that everyone will benefit from. Expect to hear more about this in coming months as these take shape.