Kapil Sachdeva's Blog - SmartCard Serenity

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2627

"The move towards smart cards is the way forward," said Gates in his keynote at IT Forum, in Copenhagen this morning. "The idea is to have a smart card that connects up in the best way - a .Net based smart card."

Microsoft partner Axalto "has done a super job on this", said Gates. "We will be using their smartcards internally - each employee will use those to get in and out of the buildings as we used to connect to our machines. We're requring them. We will completely replace passwords."

By having .Net capability, said Gates, "we think this brings different logic down to the card itself, giving a richness and continuity to the platform that only exists in that .Net environment." Axalto said this was the first commercial deployment of Axalto’s .Net-based smart cards.

For the press release goto: http://www.axalto.com/Company/press/news.asp?id=220

Finally its out of the lab as the product which is not only going to make systems secure but revolutionize the Smartcard technology with the help of excellent on-card & off-card application developement framework i.e .NET.

Except for Ping identity package for .NET (where they used the xsd generated classes) for Liberty & SAML specifications I do not see single .NET implementation of either specifications. I am surprised why ASP.NET community and companies who use ASP/ASP.NET are not concerened about these standards or may be they are waiting for Microsoft to provide WS-Federation support.

I am in the process of writting SAML 2.0 implementation in C# and will open source it once I have a working version. I am using WSE 2.0 frameworks for the implementation.

Everyone is giving its wish list for WSE 3.0 with WS-Reliable messaging being the foremost requirement so I _wish_ WSE 3.0 would have support for SAML 2.0 & WS-Federation support. Given the extensible nature of WSE its not difficult (technically). Sometime back I had written an implementation of WS-Federation for Plumbwork at GDN (now moved to SourceForge) for my identity management demo at Burton-catalyst, WSE team may take that as a starting point.