Claims-based Identity and Silverlight 4.0 – Part 1 of N
A lot as been said about Claims-based Identity in the last years, and this is has became a lot more interesting since we’ve had several issues when developing Identity of an application. Problems like defining:
- How will we do Authentication?
- Will we use Username and Password, Active Directory, Integrated Windows Authentication(Kerberos, NTLM), LiveId, OpenId, GoogleId, Twitter, Facebook? (some many options, which one is better?
- Do we really want to built another Identity Silo?
- Will we want Single-Sign-On (SSO)? How will we perform the Authentication this way? Are we going to make a replication of their Users in our platform? How will we sync that?
- What about Authorization?
- Will we need to implement, yet another Authorization Silo or will we use something like Active Directory information for it?
- Who will manage the authorizations?
So there’s a lot of questions regarding this subject that come up when we start digging a little deeper, and Claims-based Identity really helps us do this.
There are great explanations about what is Claims-based Identity and how can we used it and some of those are:
- An Introduction to Claims-Based Identity – A channel9 video from the Identity Developer Training Course where Vittorio Bertocci explains this.
- Claims and Identity: On-Premise and Cloud Solutions is an article by Vittorio Bertocci that was published on “The Architect Journal from July 2008”
- Claims-Based Authorization with WIF is an article by Michele Leroux Bustamante that was published on “MSDN Magazine from November 2009”
- Claims based Identity & Access Control Guide from the Patterns & Practices Team
- Claims-Based Identity for Windows – An article by David Chappell
- Exploring Claims-Based Identity is an article by Keith Brown that was published on “MSDN Magazine from September 2007”
- Claims-Based Identity Term Definitions
- Claims-Based Identity Overview and Concepts
Those are very interesting resources that we can use in order to understand Claims-based Identity better, but what about implementing it?
What I’ll do in the next parts will be describe how can we take advantage of Claims-based Identity in Silverlight 4 Applications, using WIF – Windows Identity Foundation to accomplish that task.
If you’ve got something you’d like to see covered just leave a comment and I’ll ‘try’ to address that topic.