Recurring 8am Friday meetings are not my style.

• I’ve been tracking WCF for a long time. Yet, it’s still a dauntingly large topic. Yesterday I spoke to a friend who works in Windows Live who is just beginning to learn about WCF and it’s literally overwhelming him. His reaction reminded me of my early reactions to COM. It feels like no matter how much you learn about WCF, the “pile” of stuff still to learn doesn’t shrink. In contrast, while my initial exposure to the .NET Framework was overwhelming, eventually I got to the point where I felt like I had a good handle on what was in there.
• With all the configuration settings in WCF, the number of valid combinations is astronomical. While WCF’s configuration based approach is arguably more flexible than a code based approach, it’s also more complex and harder to debug in my experience. Config debugging seems to be an endless cycle of tweaking the config file and running the app to see what the effect is. We need better tools than SvcConfigEditor.
• Responding to yesterday’s Morning Coffee, Jon Flanders confirmed via email that the built-in SQL WF persistence service “doesn’t recover from faults to the last good persistence point” and that “when a fault happens, the instance closes and…is removed from the persistence database.” Is this the right behavior? I’m thinking it depends on the workflow. More on this later.
• I’m trying to get my teammates to start using the Beyond Bullet Points approach to the various presentations we build as a team. Interestingly enough, it’s been easier to get my team to adopt an agile development methodology than to adopt the Beyond Bullet Point presentation methodology. I would have expected the opposite.
• The Caps trounced the Canadiens last night, ending a five game losing streak. I’m not that worried about the losing streak – the Caps have had several players out with the flu. But beating Montreal, who came into the game twelve games above .500, so badly is a good sign. And how about Nycholat? Two goals and four assists in seven games since he was called up from Hershey. Even more impressive, he’s +2 even though the Caps were 2-5 and outscored 24-18 in those seven games while averaging nearly 21 minutes of ice time per game. Here’s hoping Nycholat stays hot.

I love me some CardSpace, but I sure wish there was better documentation on how to use it, especially from WCF. The current documentation is very conceptual so you really only have the samples to go on, which sucks not to put too fine a point on it.

One example shows how to use WCS with WCF’s wsHttpBinding. However, it turns out you can also use WCS with WCF’s wsFederationHttpBinding. I’ve been experimenting with that binding talking to an STS, and it’s never invoked the WCS UI before. Why does this example invoke WCS? I’m guessing because it doesn’t specify an issuer in the config file, but I’d need to see documentation to be sure.

Also, using the federation binding appears to be the only way to request/demand additional claims beyond the private personal identifier (aka the PPID). If you want the client’s email address, name, address, etc, you need to specify that via the claimTypeRequirements of the binding’s messagesecurity element. But that configuration isn’t valid for the wsHttp binding. Why?

Finally, the two bindings produce different results on the security token. Using wsHttp, you get three claims: RSA Identity, RDA Possess Property and PPID Possess Property. When using wsFederationHttp, you get Hash Possess Property and PPID Possess Property (plus the claims you request). What happened to the RSA claims? If you attempt to add RSA to the claimTypeRequirements, CardSpace throws an error as an invalid request. Again, why? Keith Brown recently wrote about how to use the RSA claim, so it sounds like a valuable piece of information to have. How come the federation binding doesn’t send it?