New Visual Studio Toolkit for CardSpace

If you use visual studio and are interested in CardSpace, you'll be interested in Christian Arnold's brand new “Visual Studio 2005 Toolbox for Windows CardSpace”.  It looks like it makes the task of CardSpace enabling .NET 2.0 apps as easy as pie.  I'm out of the country now but can't wait to try it.

You can download the tools here.  Christian also runs what he calls a “little support forum“.

The ToolBox provides an easy way to use Windows CardSpace in your ASP.NET 2.0 Web-Application to register and validate your users. It´s also possible to use the controls to receive a SAML token and get the decrypted values of provided claims. The token decrypting process is build based on the community sample.

The install process looks pretty straightforward – you just add the tools to your toolbox:

That adds two new controls to your Visual Studio 2005 ToolBox:

Here's a taste of how you use the CreateCardSpaceUserWizard Control:

You need to add a little configuration:

<cc1:CreateCardSpaceUserWizard ID=”CreateCardSpaceUserWizard1″ runat=”server” BuildInRegistration=”False” OnUserRegistered=”CreateCardSpaceUserWizard1_UserRegistered1″>

<cc1:IdentityClaim ClaimUri= “http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/privatepersonalidentifier” />

<cc1:IdentityClaim ClaimUri= “http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress” />

</cc1:CreateCardSpaceUserWizard>

Christian explains that this causes the system to request the privatepersonalidentifier and the emailadress of a new user powered with CardSpace or other Information Card identity selector.

He explains that by defining the claim

http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/emailaddress

the control will store the emailaddress automatically, so you don't have not to worry about this 🙂

After registration the control will fire the UserRegistered Event. The eventargs will tell you the result of the operation and the provided claims as a NameValueCollection.
 
Christian goes on to explain how to use the system with the default ASP.NET 2.0 Membership-Provider. 

Clearly, there are a great many sites built on this Membership-provider technology and the emergence of this toolkit in the identity ecosystem is a major event.