Zermatt & Cloud @ TechEd New Zealand/Australia

Well, it’s almost one month since I wrote the last “useful” posts: you would not believe how incredibly busy I am on stuff I can’t talk about just yet (but soon, very soon).

In this quick update I am excited to report that I am going to speak at TechEd New Zealand & TechEd Australia! As strange as it may sound, the 114 flights I’ve boarded since I moved to Corp (October 2005) never took me under the equatorial line; furthermore, it’s since first grade that I’m told how cool it is that New Zealand is at the exact antipodes of Italy, has roughly a boot shape as well, etc… that’s the farthest place from home I can travel to without leaving the planet 🙂

I am going to deliver 2 sessions, both in NZ and in AU:

Identity & Cloud Services
(Architecture track, level 300)

The shift towards cloud computing is one of the major trends in today’s IT industry. As resources and assets 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 briefly outlines how architectures relying on claims-based identity management, security tokens and open standards can address cloud computing scenarios with the same ease with which they can handle traditional ones. The identity capabilities of Biztalk Services will be featured as a concrete example of an application of the new paradigm.

“Zermatt” Developer Framework: Putting Authentication Code in its Place
(SOA & Business Process, level 300)

The current practice of embedding identity management logic in the application code has led to a generation of software that is brittle, hard to maintain and difficult to use in a service oriented architecture. Rethinking identity management in terms of claims and security tokens eliminates the problem at the root, by externalizing the authentication logic. The “Zermatt” Developer Framework provides developers with a set of classes, tools and controls for building claims-aware applications and Security Token Services (STS). In this session you will learn the essential patterns for authentication, claims-driven behavior, STS use and development, as well as advanced scenarios.

If you follow this blog, expect many of the concepts seen here to be featured as visual studio escapades, slideware and blabbering in a thick Italian accent.

Unfortunately I won’t have any time at all to look around, but I do hope that I’ll have a chance to breathe some of the atmosphere there and meet a lot of interesting people. Really, really , really looking forward!!! 🙂