Securing ASP.NET and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Applications with Windows Cardspace
Vittorio Bertocci
I attended to a second session about Windows Cardspace, and I’m afraid that by mistake have written some topics about this session in my other post about Windows Cardspace…
So, I’ll just leave some brief notes that can became handy.
He gave us an preview of a library of WC components called ADFS “2″. These components make very easy to integrate Windows Cardspace in a .NET application. Today, to develop a WC web application you must do it “hardcoded” with HTML to specify the WC object and code login/registering logic.
With these components it’s just drag and drop.
Something I learned in this session that wasn’t clear in the first one, is that you can define your own cards with custom information!
A developer diary on implementing Windows Cardspace
Dominick Baier
Do you know Windows Cardspace? A new feature of .NET framework that allows authentication over the internet.
It is designed to be convenient and secure (avoiding phishing).
Nowadays authentication is application-centric. This means that which website has it’s own authentication system, stores information and the credentials of the users.
This design has some problems. People are registered in many sites. And they don’t want to memorize many passwords, so they tend to use the same password in almost all of them. If a hacker discovers one of them it can be a big big problem. By the other hand, many websites stores personal information, almost like a business card. But a year or so after the registration many informations can change (such as address, phone number and so on).
Windows Cardspace has a user-centric design. The information is stored in user’s computer. There is no need for a password. Windows Cardspace can also store information about the user (like a business card). When a user uses a card in a website, this website can refresh information about the user in their database.
This system can be used side-by-side with a old fashion way.
This system has a problem with mobility… To access websites from different computers you must backup a card into a disk or pen (protected by a password) an temporarily import it into the computer you want to use.
Alcides has told me about OpenID. I will have a look at it soon.
If you have Windows Vista try Windows Cardspace in SignOn.com
Women in Technology
Ani Babaian, Irene Pathy
During lunch time there was an great session with a panel of 4 women and an insider man 
This session was about the role of women in the technological world. They talked about topics like how to grow passion in technology among women, and how children should be taught that way.
Because women are so different from men, they must be reached in different ways. In USA, for example, there are some programs for young woman.
Another topic was the importance of women in developing teams. They’re important in these teams. Why? Because diversity is good to create new things. By the other hand, women generally have great communication and people management skills.
I know that they also talked about motherhood, but I had already left to the next session. There were too many overlaps in this day… But check out at Susana Vilaça. He was there during all session. She hasn’t posted about it yet, but I’m sure that she will soon.
Communities? Can They really help my business, my day-to-day job, and my career?
Bart Martens
This was a session lunch (AKA one of the sessions that prevents me from having lunch :-P)
The speaker talked about what was a community many centuries ago and now.
It started as a bunch of people with common interests but now is much more than that.
From the IT and Development point of view, communities are a support and experience sharing mean.
For companies like Microsoft, is a important source of feedback and influence on the market.
Many people consult communities blogs, wikis and forums before buy some equipment, for example.
I left at the middle of this session to attend to an simultaneous session.
Building Fun, Cool Applications with Popfly
Dan Fernandez
First time I tried Popfly I didn’t like it too much. But I gave it a change by learning more about it in this session.
There was a lot of people in this session, too much people actually. I had to attend to it in another room, with an bad streaming quality…
The main idea is to democratize development over the internet. Allow people with almost no programming experience to create rich content websites. Dan used a great analogy. The difference in the number of programming experts and people that doesn’t know how programming is like difference between the size of the Sun and the size of Saturn. Actually, after seeing his demonstration, I wasn’t convinced than Popfly is really a tool that can be used by every one… Is more like a toy for programmers
In his first demo he showed how to display a bunch of Flickr photos in a carousel and in a virtual book.
He showed how mashups (small visual) can be exported to Windows Vista Side Bar, Live Spaces, Facebook, or even to an simple HTML page. These mashups are actually Silverlight applications.
He also built an popularity comparer, that with two search terms creates a comparison graphic with the number of results in a search.
Dan also showed us how to create Building Blocks, which are the components which are combined to build mashups. It uses javascript to code behaviour and XML to store metadata like the kind of input/output that the block takes, and some suggestions about compatible blocks that can be combined with our costume one.
Pretty nice, hum?
