Windows Live ID Commits to Support OpenID

Stephen McGibbon — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:35:45 GMT

In February 2007 I noted that Craig Mundie announced collaboration on the use of Windows CardSpace with the OpenID 2.0 specification. A year later, in February 2008, Microsoft joined the board of the OpenID foundation.

Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

The current Technology Preview release is for testing purposes only, and is not intended for widespread adoption at this stage. After a period of industry testing and feedback, we will be incorporating any necessary fixes and feature enhancements into the next revision, to be released to Production sometime in 2009.

OpenID can also be used with the Windows Azure Services Platform.

Interoperability with the Windows Azure Platform

Stephen McGibbon — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:43:16 GMT

Today’s announcement at PDC2008 of Windows Azure and the Windows Azure Platform is, unsurprisingly, all over the news. There are fact sheets galore, whitepapers, transcripts, videos etc available on the PressPass Event page, I thought I’d point to this whitepaper written by David Chappell titled “Introducing the Azure Services Platform” as a good overview.

I took this snap on my phone a second or so after the name popped up.

There’s a “How does it work?” page from which I’ve taken the picture below, because I want to draw your attention to the pink “coming soon” box on the bottom right.

What’s this? Well today we also announced the Technology Preview of Cross Platform SDKs for Microsoft .NET Services. We’ve released a short document “Interoperability with the Azure Services Platform” that explains this. It starts:-

The Azure Services Platform has been built from the ground up with interoperability in mind. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple Internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and "plain old XML" (POX). This interoperability opens up opportunities to build new or enhanced applications using existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework, or with other developments environments such as Java, or Ruby.

and goes on to explain the Java SDK for .NET Services and Ruby SDK for .Net Services. These SDKs are released as open source under the BSD license on Sourceforge & Rubyforge. As you’ll surmise from the diagram, we plan to extend this to support for PHP & Python in future releases too. I believe that this is the first time Microsoft has delivered cross-platform SDKs to coincide with the MSDN SDKs.

Notes2Self.net : Interoperability, Cloud

Windows Live ID Commits to Support OpenID

Interoperability with the Windows Azure Platform