I wrote a lot about Authorization Manager in the past, and i really believe that this piece of technology is extremely useful to virtualize your authorization decisions in complex applications.

Everytime I demo AzMan to customers or students, they really like the feature set – but some questions come up every time – why isn’t this tool more popular? Does it have a future? If we base our applications completely on AzMan, what will happen when MSFT decides to deprecate it in favour of some other funky new technology??

I didn’t have answers for them – but yesterday i finally made it to watch the ADFS episode on the .NET Show – they demo’d AzMan and the new federation services – seems that these technologies will go hand in hand in the future, and there will be some interesting new features in AzMan that make me believe that there is indeed a future, which is good.

The new version of AzMan will be shipped in Server 2003 R2 and includes

• Support for SAML Tokens and Assertions (or Statements)
• Support for ADAM Principles

OK – so now i want to see a managed implementation, GUI support for custom SIDs and a final word if the AuthorizationStoreRoleProvider will make it in the final ASP.NET 2.0 bits…

Go watch the show – this is extremely cool stuff….