I’ve been talking about Geneva for a long time. I got the basics down earlier in the year. I tried to come up with my own set of sample apps, but failed to get anywhere. With the official release, and renaming to Windows Identity Foundation (WIF), I have renewed inspiration.

I read Michele Leroux Bustamante’s MSDN magazine article, Claim-Based Authorization with WIF, last night. After reading the article, I was confident that I could get a claims-aware WCF service stood up with a custom STS in a matter of hours. Today I downloaded and installed WIF. I also installed the WIF SDK and all of the prerequisite hotfixes. I perused the readme files and looked through some of the samples code. Everything is layed out sensibly, the samples are commented sufficiently, and the samples include setup and cleanup batch scripts when necessary.

The samples include:

Quick Start

1. Simple Claims Aware Web Application
2. Simple Claims Aware Web Service
3. Simple Web Application With Information Card SignIn
4. Simple Web Application With Managed STS
5. Claims Aware Web Application in a Web Farm
6. Using Claims In IsInRole

End-to-end Scenario

1. Authentication Assurance
2. Federation For Web Services
3. Federation For Web Applications
4. Identity Delegation
5. Web Application With Multiple SignIn Methods
6. Federation Metadata

Extensibility

1. Claims Aware AJAX Application
2. Convert Claims To NT Token
3. Customizing Request Security Token
4. Customizing Token
5. WSTrustChannel
6. Claims-based Authorization

All of the samples I’ve run through so far are great. The only thing that I’m not in love with is all the XML required to wire this stuff up. Maybe some Juval-style extensions would make it less painful.

One more thing… it looks like all of the XP users will finally have to upgrade. WIF only works with Vista, Win7, and Win2008. I heard that Win2003 compatibility will arrive in December.

Download Windows Identity Foundation

Download Windows Identity Foundation SDK

WCF never ceases to amaze me. Around every corner is another fascinating use for WCF, and much forethought on Microsoft's part to make it look and behave great. I wanted to expose my services to my AJAX functions on my web site. I did not want to change my class library because it is used by other clients. I could just add the service classes to this web site, but why re-do when you can re-use.

If you have an existing WCF Service Library, you will need to expose it with the AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed attribute on the service class to make it visible to ASP.NET clients. To avoid changing your service library in any way, the easiest thing to do is to add a new class to your web site that inherits from your service class. In this example, my existing service library uses the JeepServices namespace. Notice there is no implementation in this class. It is simply a placeholder for the real service implementation with the compatibility attribute attached.

Now that I have a ASP.NET compatible service, I need to expose it to the web site clients. Create a service file (.svc), and change the Service and CodeBehind attributes to point to the .svc file. The last thing you need is the Factory attribute. This notifies WCF of this service, eliminating the need for a configuration file entry for the service endpoint. In fact, you don't even need the <system.servicemodel> in your configuration file at all. This is because it is only hosted as a web script, and cannot be called outside of the web site.

In your web page you will need a few things. First your will need a ScriptManager with a ServiceReference to the .svc file. You will then need the Javascript functions to make the call (DoJeepWork), handle the success message (OnJeepWorkSucceeded), and handle the failure message (OnJeepWorkFailed). Notice in DoJeepWork that you don't call the service by it's service name WebHttpService, you call it by the ServiceContract namespace and name. For this example, my interface has ServiceContract attributes Namespace = "JeepServices", and Name = "JeepServiceContract". Now you just wire up a ASP.NET control's OnClientClick or an input or anchor tag's onclick to DoJeepWork() and you are good to go.

Mission accomplished! Here you've seen how to expose an existing WCF service library without changing any code in the library itself. Adding two files allowed the service to be exposed to your AJAX clients. Best of all, there is no configuration file changes to make.

Useful Links:

• Exposing WCF Services to Client Script

A great series of blog posts by Scott Guthrie about the ASP.NET MVC Framework coming soon as part of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions release.

Upon hearing the news, a few friends started questioning its intent, usefulness, and longevity. Many of us have been using or contemplating conversion to the MVP pattern, most recently using WCSF. The recent split of the MVP pattern by Fowler has caused many believers to question their faith. While many are still "proving" MVP, MVC has been around for nearly 30 years. Some believe that MVP and MVC can co-exist. Here is a comparison of MVP and MVC that concludes by painting an optimistic picture of MVP and MVC contributing to each other.

ASP.NET MVC appears to be the answer to my unit testing, REST, and code separation prayers. Thank you ScottGu and team!

Check it out!

It's only a week away, and there are still spaces left.

Information   Register    Sessions

Many hosting companies, like mine, won't have the AJAX Extensions installed in the GAC for quite a while, if ever.   No worries, you can just put the DLLs in your Bin folder.   Since MS hasn't graced us with the DLLs, so you'll have to get them out of your GAC.  I haven't found a way to copy DLLs using Windows Explorer, but command-line never fails.

copy "C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions\1.0.61025.0__31bf3856ad364e35" C:\dev\MyApp\Bin\
copy "C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions.Design\1.0.61025.0__31bf3856ad364e35" C:\dev\MyApp\Bin\

I frequently place an UpdatePanel around a paged GridView with inline editing.   During OnRowUpdating, the object is saved.   If the save was not successful, I like to show an alert box with the error message.  

I recently migrated from the Atlas May CTP to ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX.   The following code worked with the May CTP, but, from my research, has not worked since July CTP:

Page.ClientScript.RegisterStartupScript(typeof(string), "alertScript", "alert('Error Message');", true);

However, our pals at Microsoft have given us something just as good.   I found it by mistake while trying to put in a hack involving checking the value of ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Page).IsInAsyncPostBack.  Here is the AJAX-friendly equivalent:

ScriptManager

.RegisterStartupScript(this.updatePanel, typeof ( string ), "alertScript", "alert('Error Message');", true );

Hope this helps someone.  There are many blog posts, with many more comments, with people compaining about this.

I just migrated from the Atlas July CTP to ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0.  After following all of the instructions on the AJAX site, my web site still showed tons of errors.  I'm using a Web Site, not Web Application, with a ScriptManager in a WebForm that uses a MasterPage.   Every page shows errors on AJAX tags. 

Yes, I removed the Atlas DLL.  No, my web.config is not messed up.  Something else is wrong here.   I found a "fix".   The sequence of steps seems a little odd to me, but I did't care, it worked.  However, the problem resurfaced when I closed my MasterPage.

More searching led me to a great alternative to a true solution.   An ASP.NET Forums post had some back-and-forth on the topic.  Ultimately, the best solution at this point is to change the tagprefix to "ajax".   This works great, and, in fact, I like it better because it separates the ajax controls from the standard asp controls.

< add tagPrefix = " ajax " namespace = " System.Web.UI " assembly = " System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35 " />

Rick Strahl delivered another excellent white paper. In addition to his white papers, he has one of the most readable and intelligent blogs on the web.

White paper: Past the AJAX Hype - some things to think about

Dmitri Khanine and Phil Carrillo author this fine article on Javascript RPC. Finally, an article that mentions separation of business and presentation logic, and implementing MVC in ASP.NET. We need more patterns and practices discussions, and a lot less "look what I can do" articles.

MSDN Article: Life without Refresh