One of the thorns in the sides of all Internet users is the plethora of accounts they need to keep track of for the various websites they use throughout the day. Most of the folks running these sites don’t particularly want to create an account management system, but they need to just so they can provide their users with a personalized experience. On the other end of the spectrum, there are enterprise developers who need to constantly keep up with new protocols and credential types for securing their applications. Windows Identity Foundation might just be a solution to both of these problems, removing the need for applications to host their own authentication system, as well as reducing the number of logins a user needs to remember.

In this episode of The Knowledge Chamber, I meet with Vittorio Bertocci (who just finished a new book, Programming Windows Identity Foundation) to learn more about the basic features and capabilities of Windows Identity Foundation and see how easy it is for websites and applications to get out of the credential management game and “outsource” their authentication to another provider.

When used in conjunction with services such as the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service, Windows Identity Foundation makes it possible to log in via LiveID, Yahoo, Google, and existing Active Directory instances equipped with ADFS2, as well as by using a variety of other providers, while maintaining the exact same codebase.

If you’d like to order a copy of Vittorio’s book, you can find it here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0735627185

To find out more about Windows Identity Foundation, you should start here:
http://www.Microsoft.com/WIF

You can find Vittorio’s blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbertocci/

And you can find more videos on Channel 9 about Windows Identity Foundation here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Windows+Identity+Foundation/