Identity @ TechDays in Belgium, 10-12 March 2009

Alright, at this point it’s clear: the only moment in which I have time to blog seriously is when I am on some long flight. And guess what, that’s exactly what I am scheduled to do next Sunday!

I have the honor & privilege to present at the 2009 edition of the TechDays in Belgium, hence this weekend I’ll flight to Brussels. I have a couple of sessions:

– PreConference, March the 10th, 10:30-11:45, Architect (200) 

Identity & Cloud Services

The shift towards cloud computing is one of the major trends in today’s IT industry. As resources are increasingly hosted off-premise, traditional strategies for access control and identity management are proving incapable of handling distributed scenarios and cross-boundary communication. This presentation puts the cloud computing trend in perspective, considers its effects on identity management and explores architectures & patterns addressing cloud computing scenarios with the same ease with which they can handle traditional ones. The .NET Access Control service will be used for demonstrating some practical application of the proposed practices

– March the 12th, 16:15-17:30, Developer Server & Services (300)

Showing authentication to its place: claim-based identity, services and “Geneva”

The code that takes care of authentication is traditionally one of the nastiest spot of every distributed application. The current situation derives from multiple causes, from tightly coupling with specific technologies to trusting non-experts to write security code. Microsoft has been among the thought leaders who proposed a strategic solution to the problem, the Identity MetaSystem and its claim based identities, achieving vast consensus across the industry. Come to this session to learn how you can finally put that vision in practice thanks to the new “Geneva” products line

I guess that titles and abstracts are not that surprising 🙂 I am really looking forward to the sessions! It will be an interesting challenge. Belgium is very advanced in term of identity management & claims based identity, hence I expect a lot of people interested in going deep: at the same time, you can never forget about the people that never got exposed to those concepts hence it’s always, always a balancing act between introductory and advanced. That’s how we roll 🙂

I’ll be there for the entire week, and my schedule is not 100% full yet: if you are based in Belgium and you are interested in chatting about identity next week, let’s get in touch and I am sure we’ll accommodate something.
I want to take this chance for thanking the Belgian team (Katrien and Philippe) for inviting me to speak in their event, and above all for the infinite patience with which they coped with my long periods of unresponsiveness and chronic delays. Thank you guys!

So, I’ll try to do some serious blogging while on the plane. I don’t think it will be about cloud topics: despite being at the right altitude, the lack of Internet connection makes using the cloud quite tricky 😉