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Exit WinFX, enter .NET 3

Posted on 25 Aug 2006 at 15:36

Thomas Lee explains the thinking behind Winfx's new name, and dissects its constituent parts

An example of a workflow-enabled application might be a Help Desk ticketing system, in which customers fill in an ASP.NET web form to create a trouble ticket describing some problem they're having. This ticket is then presented to a Help Desk staff member via either ASP.NET or a Windows Forms application. After the Help Desk person resolves the problem, they close the ticket, possibly sending an email back to the ticket's originator. In such a WWF application, the process logic and workflow are contained within the workflow itself, and the ASP.NET/Windows Forms application needs to know nothing about it. WWF provides tools to enable you to build workflow-based applications.

Securing it

All these new components of .NET 3 are intended to enable you to build richer applications, but deploying such applications, especially across the internet, raises issues of security and information disclosure. As the all-too-familiar phishing and identify-theft scams show, too many people disclose too much information, and too often. I'll have to confess that I've come close to being tricked myself on several occasions, as these scammers are very good at what they do.

WCS is based on the work of Kim Cameron, Microsoft's identity guru. Kim's paper "The Laws of Identity" (www.identity blog.com), examines how to "prevent the loss of trust and go forward to give internet users a deep sense of safety, privacy, and certainty about whom they are relating to in cyberspace". The basic problem boils down to the fact that the internet was built without any way to really discover who people are or what they're connected to, and so today we're using little more than a patchwork of one-off identity fixes. WCS forms one part of a larger Identity Metasystem, in effect an interoperable digital identity architecture.

This IM assumes that each individual wants and needs to have multiple digital identities. These identities disclose different information, may be based on diverse underlying technologies and are provided by different identity providers. You might have one identity provided by your employer, another provided by your bank or credit card company, or a much simpler identity like an email address. Each of these identities allows the user to associate appropriate information with it. When you go to a website and it asks you for your details, the site sends back a request for specific information (such as your name, address and credit card number) to be supplied as a security token. You can then select the particular card with the relevant information, which is then presented back to the website in the form of a security token. Cards and tokens can be provided to you from external or corporate identity providers, or can be generated by yourself (that is, self-signed security tokens), a structure that's illustrated above.

For the most part, WCS is baked into the OS and web browser: Internet Explorer will be updated to enable communication with WCS-enabled sites and to interact with identity providers, which should provide for significantly more security on the internet.

Installing .NET 3

The basic process of installing .NET 3 is the same as for earlier versions. The Vista installation process will automatically install .NET Framework 3 by default, while on Longhorn Server you can install it as a Windows feature using Roles Management tools. For earlier OS versions, you can download the latest version of .NET 3 from www.microsoft.com