Custom Info cards

Hello Raguvind.

The information cards you create by yourself, the so called "self issued cards", contains a fixed set of claims. Such set cannot be extended. Provider Cards, however, can be customized for containing any claim.

HTH,

Vittorio

VittorioBertocci-MSFT at 2007-8-30 >

Hello Raguvind,

there are at least 2 aspects to consider while answering your question: the design viewpoint and the purely technical one.

Design-wise: you create an identity provider when... well... you want to provide identities :-).
I'll explain better. If you are a bank, a government, the owner of a club, a service on the web such as mail or similar... you already "own" a list of customer identities. You may want to enable your customers to use an Information Card for representing their identity in relation to your business: so, if you are a chess club you may issue to your affiliates an information card containg their membership status, their national ranking, their county, etc etc. The idea is that they may use your information card for accessing your assets (example: booking your club rooms for private tournaments on your website) or for accessing websites which trust your association. An example for this last case would be an hypothetical national chess federation, which may admit competitors in national tournaments by trusting the information card you issued to your members for recognizing them as "pro" chess players.
So: if you are just a "private citizen", you probably don't want to be an identity provider (there are notable exceptions, though).

Technic-wise. For being a complete identity provider you need

• a way of generating managed cards for your users. Those are signed XML files describing cards. This is the place where you can decide which claims will show up in your cards, you have complete freedom on the matter. More details on the format will come.
• A Security Token Service, or STS: this is a web service that understands WS-Trust messages, that the CardSpace identity selector UI will send when the user picks your information card. Such messages will trade the credentials of the user (the famous "second authentication factor") for a WS-Security token, the real container of the claims which define your user's identity for your business.

At the moment there's not much sample code to start with, but I'm sure that patience will be rewarded ;-)

HTH,

Vittorio

VittorioBertocci-MSFT at 2007-8-30 >

Hello Raguvind.

The July CTP introduced few unexpected breaking changes: as a result, the sample card writer currently available does not produce compatible cards. An updated example should appear on wcs.netfx3.com shortly, I suggest to keep an eye on the samples & tools sections.

HTH,

Vittorio

VittorioBertocci-MSFT at 2007-8-30 >