So here's a question. How do you enable your website to use Passport for authentication? If it's built with Apache on *nix? Because after all Passport uses SOAP, right? and it's a standard that anyone can talk to, right? And MS want to encourage the other 60% of websites to support single sign in via Passport, right?

So you go to passport.com, which leads you to the Passport dev zone on MSDN, whch leads you back to passport.com dev zone, which says the docs are in the SDK available from the MSDN downloads site. So you download a couple of megabytes of SDK setup file. And run it. To be told that you need to install it on a copy of NT Server. So you dig a little deeper into MSDN and it becomes obvious that Passport support on a website actually requires a set of ISAPI DLLs and is consequently tied completely to NT, 2000 or XP Server.

Now why am I not surprised?

So I guess it's off to PingID and Liberty to see if they can do any better. Or maybe I should just implement the Drupal multiple authentication code which can already check your id from : Blogger, Delphi Forums, Drupal, Jabber, Manila, Yahoo. Because after all I want Code Now, not vague promises of Jam Tomorrow. Dammit!


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[ 06-Mar-02 12:01pm ]