Congrats to all my friends working in the Identity space on the relase of first beta of the Zermatt SDK.

Other folks have written some great posts that provide the background and motivation for Zermatt better than I ever will, and there are some links you should check out at the bottom of this post.

Suffice it to say that Zermatt is about making the power of the claims-based identity protocols we shipped in WCF V1 programmable and usable by normal humans.

Zermatt has a few things that I think are really exciting:

• Integration with IIdentity/IPrincipal, so code that you've written using [PrincipalPermissionAttribute] can be easily adapted to use claims-based authorization.
• A new HttpModule for ASP.NET Web Application, making it much easier to turn web applications into claims-based identity consumers.
• New ASP.NET UI controls for adding federated identity login capability to your web pages.
• New framework API's that make creating security token issuers (STS's) much easier to implement.

I highly recommend reading Keith Brown's whitepaper for Zermatt developers, as it gives a great overview of what Zermatt is about and the value proposition it holds for connected application developers.

I'm really looking forward to playing with this.

Here are some more links:

• Zermatt announcement from Vittorio Bertocci
• Zermatt announcement from Keith Brown
• Download the Zermatt Beta SDK

Happy hacking!