Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

CHAPTER 10 ■ .NET 3.0: PROGRAMMING WITH CARDSPACE 251
The earlier example used the Claims property to pull the desired claims from the
token and set the value of some label controls to their values like this:
Token token= new Token(xmlToken);
givenname.Text = token.Claims[ClaimTypes.GivenName];
surname.Text = token.Claims[ClaimTypes.Surname];
email.Text = token.Claims[ClaimTypes.Email];
Summary
As security is becoming more and more of a necessity as opposed to a luxury when dealing
with the Web, it is essential to make users’ experiences with security as friendly as
possible, while still protecting them from malicious web sites.
CardSpace fills this void by providing an easy-to-use and attractive way of storing
your personal information securely and digitally, and an easy means to send it to a web
site that requests it. It is designed to be a long-term replacement for passwords, and can
effectively form a client-based single sign-on for all of your favorite sites.
In this chapter, you explored CardSpace and how it looks from the user’s point of
view. You then went into putting together a development environment where you can
host your own sites that accept CardSpace credentials. As part of this exercise, you looked
briefly at site certificates and how they prevent domain spoofing. You then went into the
process of building your own CardSpace-enabled site, looking at how to embed the
CardSpace object on your pages and process it, taking user credentials and using them to
customize the site for the end user.
Finally, you took a tour of a helper class that is provided by the SDK and that implements
the token in an easily manageable way.
I hope this was a good taste of what you can do with CardSpace to make your users’
lives a lot easier. There’s a lot more information that you can drill into—and a great
resource for this is the Windows SDK documentation.
In the next chapter, we’ll get back onto the traditional web development route—
looking at the technology that effectively gave birth to Web 2.0—Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML, also known as Ajax.