Wade Wegner

I love building keynote applications! I had the great fortune to work with John Shewchuk – Technical Fellow at Microsoft – as he demonstrated a vision for how identity in Windows Azure can enable great experiences in Windows 8. I wanted to quickly provide some background on the components of the sample application he showed called Margie’s Travel.

Margie’s Travel is a sample travel application that demonstrates how you can track and manage your trips across multiple Windows 8 machines using a combination of technologies in Windows Azure and Windows 8.

The application is a Metro styled app built on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Additionally, this application was rapidly built by using the templates and samples found in the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8.

When the application is launched, the user needs to login. Rather than creating yet another identity store, or mapping directly to a specific identity provider, Margie’s Travel uses the Windows Azure Access Control Service.

When you click the login button, the application first checks the Windows PasswordVault to see if the credential (which includes the token) exists:

var vault = new Windows.Security.Credentials.PasswordVault();
var cred = vault.retrieve(url, username);

If this exists, the application will login.  If not, the the application calls out to the Access Control Service to get a list of identity providers from which the user can select.

This code is also very simple to write in JavaScript:

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open("GET", IPSFeedURL("https://ACSNAMESPACE.accesscontrol.windows.net"), false);
request.send(null);
var jsonString = request.responseText;
var jsonlist = ParseIPList(jsonString);

BindJsonToList(jsonlist);

Once the users makes the selection, the Windows Web Authentication Broker invoked. This allows us to use a consistent and secure method for handling authentication. The login page for the selected identity provider is rendered in the broker.

Once the user logs in, the Access Control Service token is return to the Web Auth Broker. The application is able to take the credential and store it into the Windows Web Vault. This gives us a consistent SSO experience so that upon subsequent launches thee user does not need to log in again.

To store the credential, we simply take the various components, create a new PasswordCredential, and add it to the vault.

var cred = new Windows.Security.Credentials.PasswordCredential(
    url,
    username,
    token);
vault.add(cred);

Furthermore, since the Web Broker can synchronize across trusted devices using Windows Live, the token is automatically synchronized to any trusted device so that you can get SSO across multiple devices.

Once logged in, the application will call out to additional Web services in Windows Azure (like the GetTravelerInfo() method) so that we can validate the users credentials before returning the results.

In addition, this token can be used to call out to additional services in Windows Azure, to get rich pictures from Bing, specific data from the Windows Azure DataMarket and Wolfram Alpha, and even weather information.

All of this is made possible by unique features and capabilities provided by Windows Azure and Windows 8.

If you want to give this a try, and learn more about how all this works, download the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. Additionally, take a look at posts by Nick Harris and Vittorio Bertocci.

I hope this helps!

I know that Twitter is nothing new and that many of you are already using it, but until recently I had managed to resist.  However, upon joining Microsoft and getting to know my evangelist peers, I found Twitter to be a great way to both keep in touch and coordinate with my friends and coworkers.  Furthermore, having recently moved from Colorado to Illinois, I found that Twitter is also a great way to keep in touch with distant and remote friends.  It’s great to hear what’s going on with my friends, like Rich Finn and Ryan McCutchen; also, unlike instant messaging technologies, we don’t have to be online at the same time.

So, as you have probably guessed, I have started to Twitter; you can follow me at: http://twitter.com/wadewegner/.

There are tons of people twittering away all day long, and one of the challenges I’ve had is filtering out the the noise.  Consequently, the one bit of advice I will give to newcomers is to start slow and resist the temptation to start following hundreds of people all at once; I did this at first, and I found it overwhelming.

As a RESTful service using simple SMS, Twitter makes it easy to interact via many different clients.  One that I’ve started using on my Windows Mobile 6 device is TinyTwitter.  This tool allows me to read the messages of people I’m following and post updates when I’m away from my computer.

Neat stuff.  Try it out, and feel free to follow!

I learned about the FreeRice program from James McGovern’s blog post.  Not only does it appear to be a worthwhile program, but the it was fun to test my vocabulary.

I stopped after providing 500 grains of rice.  I realized that my 500 grains wouldn’t make a difference unless I also spread the word.  So please, dear reader, take a moment and test your own vocabulary!