It seems like I've deteriorated into semi-annual blog posts.  Sigh.  At least the discussion groups at www.directoryprogramming.net continue to flourish and we are seeing a nice uptick in activity on the ADFS board there.  I think the writing may be on the wall for me as a blogger, but who knows.  Perhaps I'll get back on the wagon.

Anyway, thanks to all the people who came to see my talks at DEC this year.  I hope you enjoyed visiting my town and you got a lot out of the conference itself.  DEC is one of my favorites and I'm happy to see it continue to do well.  I got a lot of nice feedback on both of my talks and I'm always interested to hear what you thought.

My first talk this year was on customizing ADFS.  To my knowledge, this type of stuff has never been talked about publicly before, so the session was a bit of an experiment.  I essentially tried to cover all the different types of things you should and could do to ADFS V1 or 1.1 (2003 R2 server or 2008 server) to make it do different things.  It started off discussing some cosmetics to apply to the pages displayed by the FS, moved through ADAM account store tweaks and then covered custom claim transformation modules and some advanced hacks/mods such as non-Windows authentication.  Some of that stuff has been discussed here on this blog and nearly all of it was based on stuff we've actually done at work, so basically real world experience.  My fear was that the subject matter would be a little over the audience's head since it wasn't introductory at all (assumed you already knew ADFS pretty well) and covered some developer stuff which might have seemed alien to many of the audience members who tend to be more of the IT Pro sort.  Still, I think it was valuable stuff.

I mentioned a sample custom claim transform module that I'd post the source to.  I'll follow that up in a separate post shortly.

The audiences for all the ADFS talks were pretty small by comparison to the big AD talks, but this doesn't surprise me.  Not only is ADFS still a new thing, but to a great extent it is a luxury for most DEC attendees to be able to go to those sessions.  ADFS largely assumes that both the directory and the identity provisioning stuff is all a solved problem and that we have rich repositories filled with security principals whose identity is trustworthy and stuffed with useful metadata that can be converted to claims.  For many, that is not (yet) a solved problem at all and federated identity is still largely wishful thinking.  Still, you have to start somewhere.

My second talk was essentially the talk I've done at DEC now for 3 years, although this time modified heavily to cover the new .NET 3.5 stuff in System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.  I was really dreading this talk and didn't finish the slides for it before the conference, so between the last minute PPT work and the anxiety, I only got about an hour of sleep.

Still, the talk seemed to go off pretty well.  I was in the big room this time and in one of the last slots of the conference, so I had low expectations for turnout.  It seemed like I had a pretty good crowd though (not the Dean and Joe show, but I'll take it!) and people seemed to be into it.  I think it was probably the best version of that talk I've done to date, so all in all I'm quite happy.  I miss having Ryan there to bounce stuff around with, but so it goes.

Thanks also to Donovan for inviting me up for his case studies talk and giving me an opportunity to talk about some of the real world stuff we are doing with federation at work and talking about the process and legal stuff as much as the technical aspects.  People clearly have as many if not more questions about those things than the engineering parts.

I think I finally get CardSpace now, especially as it applies to the enterprise, and am looking forward to having a chance to get it running internally.  That should be interesting.  Stuart, I need some bits I can actually deploy.  :)  Thanks to Pamela Dingle for coming to DEC and bringing both the CardSpace love and the non-MS platform perspective.  I'm anxious to go to a conference where everyone knows her and no one knows me at all and see how I do.

She's got a nice follow up on the Wook Lee Challenge this year which I played a tiny role in.

Customizing-ADFS.zip (1.06 MB)

DotNet-DS-Programming.zip (1.27 MB)