My, how fast the word travels . Last week, we rolled out a CTP of two new "infrastructure" services hosted in the Live cloud - a Relay and a Security Token Service. Anyone who's ever built a P2P app is familiar with the firewall / NAT traversal problem - both peers are often non-addressible from the outside, and so you have to use some sort of relay as a solution. The various Instant Messenger clients, Groove, Napster, etc are all well-known examples of applications that had to roll out relaying capabilities on their own. The idea behind the Live Labs Relay service is to have a relay in the cloud that developers can use for ubiquitous connectivity instead of having to roll their own. While the protocols for using the Relay are public (anyone from any platform can use it), we've integrated the Relay with the WCF programming model in the form of a "meta" channel / binding, that developers can use to abstract all the connectivity goo from their applications. Check it out here . Also check out DavidWor's relay blog (congrats David! :-)) The Security Token Service we rolled out is the perfect complement to the Infocard identity system we are shipping with WCF and Vista. The federated security model that Infocard is based on the idea that a service (or website) requires a set of claims to authorize a request. A user logged into a Windows domain, for example, has a set of claims that the Kerberos domain controller can vouch for on her behalf. But of course if you're trying to authorize a user across security domains, you really need a more neutral way of specifying claims. An STS is essentially a "claims converter" - you give it one set of claims and it gives you back a set of claims that you understand, and can use to authorize the user. One cool thing about the STS we just rolled out is that it effectively does that mapping between the claims in an Infocard (that you create) and a Windows Live ID. A service or site that wants to support Infocard as a way for the user to specify their identity would normally need to roll out an STS on their own. With the Live Labs STS service, you just need to register your site or service with our cloud STS, and when someone tries to use the service with their Infocard, our STS will do the claims conversion and authorize the user. Check it out here , and the blog as well. Congrats Hervey ! Read More...