A flock of pigs has been doing aerobatics high up over Microsoft Campus in Redmond in the past three weeks. Neither City of Redmond nor Microsoft spokespeople returned calls requesting comments in time for this article. An Microsoft worker who requested anonymity and has seen the pigs flying overhead commented that "they are as good as the Blue Angels at Seafair, just funnier" and "they seem to circle over building 42 a lot, but I wouldn't know why". In related news ... We wrapped up the BizTalk Services "R11" CTP this last Thursday and put the latest SDK release up on http://labs.biztalk.net/ . As you may or may not know, "BizTalk Services" is the codename for Microsoft's cloud-based Identity and Connectivity services - with a significant set of further services in the pipeline. The R11 release is a major milestone for the data center side of BizTalk Services, but we've also added several new client-facing features, especially on the Identity services. You can now authenticate using a certificate in addition to username and CardSpace authentication, we have enabled support for 3rd party managed CardSpace cards, and there is extended support for claims based authorization. Now the surprising bit: Only about an hour before we locked down the SDK on Thursday, we checked a sample into the samples tree that has a rather unusual set of prerequisites for something coming out of Microsoft: Runtime: Java EE 5 on Sun Glassfish v2 + Sun WSIT/Metro (JAX-WS extensions), Tool: Netbeans 6.0 IDE . The sample shows how to use the BizTalk Services Identity Security Token Service (STS) to secure the communication between a Java client and a Java service providing federated authentication and claims-based authorization. The sample, which you can find in ./Samples/OtherPlatforms/StandaloneAccessControl/JavaEE5 once you installed the SDK, is a pure Java sample not requiring any of our bits on either the service or client side. The interaction with our services is purely happening on the wire. If you are a "Javahead", it might seem odd that we're shipping this sample inside a Windows-only MSI installer and I will agree that that's odd. It's simply a function of timing and the point in time when we knew that we could get it done (some more on that below). For the next BizTalk Services SDK release I expect there to be an additional .jar file for the Java samples. It's important to note that this isn't just a thing we did as a one-time thing and because we could. We have done a significant amount of work on the backend protocol implementations to start opening up a very broad set of scenarios on the BizTalk Services Connectivity services for platforms other than .NET. We already have a set of additional Java EE samples lined up for when we enable that functionality on the backend. However, since getting security and identity working is a prerequisite for making all other services work, that's where we started. There'll be more and there'll be more platform and language choice Read More...