Thanks OrangeSoul...As part of its growing portfolio of .NET services, Microsoft will expose its Passport authentication service as an XML Web service this summer, officials said. The forthcoming Microsoft Passport Web Service, which will support XML and the delivery of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages over HTTP, joins existing Microsoft Web services such as .NET Alerts and MapPoint Web Service.
The Passport Web Service will also support WS-Security, a specification designed to secure data stored in the online authentication service. Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign submitted the latest version of the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) last June.
"We"re exposing the Passport service as a Web service," said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web service marketing at Microsoft," in an interview with CRN Wednesday. "It"ll add WS-Security so there"s encryption and digital signatures, and it"ll have a WSDL file."