Chapter Three of my upcoming book focuses on the work being done with information cards and in the identity metasystem by people outside of Microsoft. The chapter covers third parties and open source projects,  focusing primarily on the folks building identity selectors and security token servers.  In the process of researching that chapter, I ,of course, ran across the work of Chuck Mortimore. If not famliar with his work, Chuck has built out a Java Relying Party, an identity selector plug-in for FireFox, and his site ( http://www.xmldap.org) issues managed cards.  His identity selector has even been enhanced to handle interop with OpenID (see screenshot below).

Needless to say, I was impressed with his work, and reached out to him about including screenshots of his work in that chapter. He was very gracious and gave his approval. As I was wrapping up the book, one of the readers of this blog asked if we were going to have support for Java in the book. Initially, for relying parties, I'd only committed to the publisher for ASP.NET and PHP. In the pre-.NET world, I actually was an early adopter of Java  (heck, I even hired Gary Cornell, of Core Java fame, to come to Boston and train my team on Java), so I thought what the hell, and decided to  have a go at it. As I was dusting off my core-java books to write the sample, I thought to myself, if I was a java guy, who would I want a sample from? A Microsoft guy who hasn't written any Java code in awhile? Probably not

I thought of who - if I was a reader - I'd like to see the Java sample come from. A big fan of his work over at xmldap.org, I reached out to Chuck and asked if he'd be interested in contributing a java sample for the chapter. I am really pleased to announce that not only did he agree, he's already sent me the code. If you've not done so already, definately check out his site, he's doing some great work.