On January 17, 2012 I will be speaking at the Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group. The topic for the evening is You Can Do What in Windows Azure?! Here’s an abstract of the session:

You already know you can run your .NET based web sites, services, and applications on Windows Azure, but this only scratches the surface of what you can do. Encoding video with Expression Encoder, hosting adaptive streaming video in blob storage, hosting multiple web sites, enabling remote desktop, running php, node.js, and MongoDB, creating a VPN and more are all possible with the Windows Azure platform. In this demo intensive session I’ll show you how to do amazing things to unleash the power of Azure.

You can find out more about the session and register for it here.

On January 19, 2012 I’ll be giving a new presenting at the Twin Cities Connect Systems User Group. The topic for this talk is Securing WCF Services with the Windows Azure Access Control Service. Here’s a taste of what we’ll be covering:

Integrating your WCF services with third-party authentication and identity management systems can be a daunting task. Some of the common challenges associated with this task include:
•    Configuring WCF bindings to request a token from ACS
•    Validating the incoming token issued by the identity provider
•    Parsing the incoming token
•    Implementing authorization checks
•    Transforming tokens by adding, removing, or changing the claims types and values
•    Using configuration rather than code to accomplish all of the above

In this session we’ll look at how to use the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) to tackle these challenges. We’ll start by covering the basics of identity management and ACS. From there we’ll look at how to secure WCF services via ACS using the following methods:
•    WCF Username Authentication
•    WCF Certificate Authentication
•    WCF Federated Authentication with AD FS 2.0

You can find out more about this event and register for it here.