As my good friend Tomas notes , the Connected Systems Division (the people that did WSE, Indigo, Workflow and much more) are doing some pretty interesting "Cloud" services. At the moment these are experimental services you can play with but they don't yet have any SLAs or assurances. If that turns out to be the case, it will be a huge step forward and I would jump on it on my project. What do they have? They have an STS: Security Token Service that is an open identity provider that integrates with CardSpace to provide an authentication service. Having implemented a bare bones STS, I know this is not easy work and mine is far from complete. I need to use SAML, WS-Federation, CardSpace/OpenId to integrate with Java platforms and existing authentication providers. This is a HUGE win for us if we don't have to build it and IF Microsoft hosts it with the appopriate SLAs. Next up is the Relay Service which lets you expose a WCF based endpoint/service to the Internet from behind a firewall or NAT. Having worked with two companies in my past, Groove and Adesso, that had Relay Services and groked this area, I am real excited. The Relay Service uses whatever security policies you have and had defined with the STS so its secure. One scenario that is key for us is that we wanted to offer a "Direct" Service to two banks that want to collobrate with each other. We looked at doing that with with Dual Bindings in WCF but of course banks don't want to punch another hole in their firewall so this could be a great solution. Have a look! All this stuff works with the .NET Framework 3.0 and WCF. Technorati Tags: .NET , Windows Communication Foundation , WCF , Software Architecture , .NET Framework 3 , Microsoft Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it!
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