The Id Element: a new Channel9 show all about Identity

Identity finally has its very own home on Channel9: today we are launching a new show and a new topic area, both under the title “The Id Element”. As the introductory page recites:

Welcome to The Id Element, your one-stop shop for all things identity on Channel9!
In this page you will find all kinds of material on Identity and Access Control: weekly interviews with product team members, developer how-tos, news, aggregated resources and more. There will be content for identity experts and those just getting started with the topic; content for developers and for IT Pros; discussions at the architecture level and step-by-step code guides. We hope you will like what you see: if you let us know about the topics you’d like us to feature in this space, we will do our best to bring them to you.

We mean every word of it! Donovan and I will stalk the campus and industry events with a camera, getting the best info directly at the source. In first interview, already available online, Donovan had a great chat with Stuart Kwan about identity and Geneva. Just few hours ago I was in Hervey Wilson’s office: Hervey gave a great introduction to the Geneva Framework, giving a perspective that you can get only from somebody who was involved with the project from its very inception. It should be online next week. Ah, did I mention that we are releasing videos on weekly basis? And for a change, we used a URL you can easily remember! It’s http://channel9.msdn.com/identity. This is coming  out really hot, and it is still making its way through the channel9 system: expect references to the topic area and to the show to appear through the portal in the next hours.

Some behind the scenes: why “The Id Element” and all this periodic table thing? As we explain in the inaugural video, Identity is a fundamental aspect of every distributed system: no matter what you are trying to do or on what platforms, chances are that at a certain point some piece of software will wonder who you are and if it should allow you to go ahead with what you are trying to do. Identity is as foundational to distributed systems as chemical properties are the ultimate foundation of our environment. The vast majority of the people successfully interact with the environment without giving any thought about chemical properties. In the same way, the user and many developers are simply not interested in the intricacies of identity: but with traditional approaches they may be forced to cope with it anyway. The hope is that, as we explore the world of modern identity and access management, you will discover that claims and the breed of products centered on them finally allow application developers to stop worrying about identity and leave that concern to the alchemists of security 🙂