Philip Beadle's Blog

Overview

Yesterday I attended a one day training session on Windows Cardspace to be released in .Net 3.0 and natively in Vista.  The course was run by Nigel Watling who is a Developer Platform Evangelist for Microsoft specialising in Cardspace.  The session started out with a slide deck which Nigel promise to post next week explaining about Identity and how the Internet was built without an identity layer.  Kim Cameron who is the Architect of Cardspace has a list of Laws of Identity that many people have contributed to to make a fairly comprehensive list of laws that an Identity system must adhere to if it is to work for all situations.

The training session was very well done and Nigel obviously knows his stuff, the labs we did showed that is relatively easy to integrate Cardspace into your web sites.  The major point of the whole day was not how easy Cardspace is to use etc  or anything to do with Vista and .Net 3.0 but that Identity Selectors (which is all Cardspace is) can be built by anyone and already have been built by Sun, IBM and Redhat.  This is because they are all using the same open standard which means that there will be good industry take up and many websites will be using Information Cards soon.

One of the things I thought stuck out was that to use Cardspace on your site you will need an SSL certificate.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that it makes the web a much more secure place but bad in that I think this will be a major stumbling block for your Average Joe website.  There are a couple of ways to make sure all sites that require any information from us have SSL. 

• SSL is included as part of any site hosting arrangement
• Cardspace becomes so popular that any site not using it wont get any information from its users.

The demonstrations of Cardspace showed a mature product that was simple to use and control.  It will give a lot of confidence back to Mum & Dad and will make the Internet a safer place which is good for us all.  Microsoft will only support Cardspace on IE7 and will not port it back for earlier versions.  In my view this is a good idea as IE6 is at least 6 years old so its time for an upgrade :) 

Cardspace allows the creation of Self Issued Cards and the ability to install Managed Cards.  Self Issued Cards are exactly like what we do  now when we register on a website, the card contains our own claims that what we are entering is true.   A managed card is one that is issued by a 3rd Party Identity Provider such as a bank or the government.  These cards can be thought of in the same way as your drivers license that says you can drive, your bank card that says you have a bank account with a particular bank.  Now when you go to a site that requires just your name and email address you could use one of your own self issued cards to register, if you buy something from the site you would use your Purchasing card which was issued by your bank.  When you use this card your credit card details are never given to the site and never transmitted because the bank which is operating as your identity provider already knows your CC number it just looks you up on your secure encrypted Private Personal ID (PPID) and returns a transaction response to the Relying Party (the website you bought an item from).  Much safer:)

Another really cool feature of Cardspace is its built in antiphishing.  The first time you use your card at a site there is a warning that tells you you haven't been here before are you sure you want to give your details.  Imagine this scenario:  You use Bank X once a week to do your banking and then one day you get the obligatory phishing email that says some crazy story about updating your credentials online.  When you click the link in the fake email and go to the fake site and use your Infocard you will be warned that this is the first time you have been to this site.  This should be a warning to you and thus you have successfully avoided being phished. 

I have reinstalled the 95.61 drivers from Lap top 2 go and now that I have disabled the cool glass effect I am not having many troubles at all.  I have Aero running and everything works just fine :)

As part of my research for the Dummies book I looked into implementing the Href Exchanger from Inventua.  With this cool http module you can have nice URL's like www.philipbeadle.net/humour.aspx instead of the DNN format with the TabID etc.  This is good for advertising your pages and putting in emails etc.  You can also use different suffixes.  Inventua use .content like this http://www.inventua.com/dnn-hrefexchanger.content.

Try it out for free and if you like it you can buy it.

I have now added the DotNetNuke Daily Comic Module on the Humour page.  Featuring everyone's favourite Geek, Dilbert.  This module is provided by Mike Horton based on previous versions created by Francis Noël and David Kafrissen.

Lorraine and I were walking Thor the other day and saw this sign in a back lane near us.

I have been toying with the idea of riding my Harley up to Sydney for the week of Tech Ed 2006.  I just checked out the driving directions on Local.Live.com and found out it's 865km which is shorter than I thought it was.

So I think I will do it.  I reckon I should leave at say 3am which would have me in Wodonga for breakfast and then I can spend the rest of the day covering the final 500km.  Shouldn't be too hard.  I used to drive a LOT when I lived in Broome and Kalgoorlie so 10 hours is a snitch.  My only issue is how to stay warm during the first 4 hours or so until the sun comes up.

Woohoo I'm gonna be in print.  Remember that paper stuff?  I have been asked to write a couple of chapters for the upcoming DotNetNuke for Dummies book.  There are 4 of the DotNetNuke Core Team writing this book so it will be packed with good tips and how to's aime at the user and not developers.  The writers are my beautiful wife Lorraine, Scott Willhite and Chris Paterra.

I started writing last night and plan to get Chapter 10 done by tomorrow lunch time.  It's amazing how much and how fast you can write on something you know a lot about.  Especially in such an informal style as a Dummies book.  You can preorder the book by clicking the Amazon link at the bottom of EVERY page in my site :)

Paul Stovell has built a really cool application in WPF to make picking your Tech Ed 2006 sessions a cinch, it even adds the sessions to Outlook for you.  I managed to get it to build on Vista 5472 by installing the June Orcas build like this.

msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1

I followed the isntructions on Magnus' blog.  Worked a treat.

Only one minor issue between Pauls Beta 2 code running on Vista 5472 is that the cells on the page do not update when you add a session.  They load fine from the Load command and the mouse over works so I will try to find out what the difference is.

I didnt need to change any source so all you need to do is install Orca as above and open the solution from Pauls blog.  He should also have the binaries I made ready for download as well.

I just watched the preview video for Microsoft Live Labs - Photosynth.  This is a seriously great idea.  Essentially they have built a system that scans the web for similar photos and puts them all together to create virtual real worlds.  The demo shows the Basilica in Rome.  Amazing stuff, can't wait till we can program against it like we can with Virtual Earth.

To save anyone the hassle of figuring out how to bus it to Microsoft frm the city (Sydney), here's a post with pictures on how to do it.

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