New version of the Biztalk Services SDK available, now with support for managed cards

Almost one year ago I briefly mentioned the Biztalk Service SDK, here and here. A new version has recently been made available: you would not believe the amount of new features that were added to it in this timeframe. The main reason of excitement for me is that this new release supports managed cards! It's a bit late at night here in Redmond and the drowsiness makes me feel less than bright right now, so I better defer detailed explanations to tomorrow (or the weekend). Anyway, for the identirati tuned in, this basically means that the service bus offers a R-STS that will accept, among many other means of authentication, also third party's managed cards. The behavior of the R-STS can be influenced by using the Biztalk Services identity portal, or by management API; you can translate attribute claims into authorization claims (if an incoming claim has a certain value you can issue a token which tells to the ultimate destination that the caller is authorized to perform the call; you can copy the input claims directly in the issued token so that the info is preserved; and so on). "Artist" rendering below:

Again, I'll be more verbose in a later post: in fact, I plan to walk you through a sample that will make you hit the ground running exactly with that feature.

The managed card support is the feature that I find most appealing (surprised?), but in fact there are many other great additions such as X509 authentication, REST management APIs, support for multiple languages... I suspect I'll give much more space in this feed to the identity capabilities of the Biztalk Services. In fact, I have some big change to announce... but not yet ;-)