Hello friends,

I´m in the process of redesigning my whole system... and I´m brainstorming some great ideas to try to implement in this next version... you may already know my site -> http://www.chapeco-online.com.br. But the actual site does not really matter right now. The current system is a total mess but it was my first big project, so, I´m slowly evolving and I want this next version to be the most OOP possible, in other words - maintanable and easy to modify.

.NET Passport technology has been around for quite some time and is being used by a number of other Microsoft technologies (such as MSN Messeger) to provide a user system. What I´d like to do is use the .NET Passport as my primary source of information about the users of my site. If a user would like to log-in into my site to use its member-only features, he/she would use their .NET Passport account information. My middleware would somehow connect to the Microsoft .NET Passport servers and, after a sucessful authentication, I would have plenty of useful data to use about the user. Considering that almost everyone has a .NET Passport account, this would be a quite fancy feature. Any additional information or features I would implement on a local table on my own system as I´m quite sure I can´t add new types of data to the .NET Passport account...

Later, after implementing this user system .NET Passport-compatible, I would like to use the Messenger technology to build interactive plug-ins to interact with the site content... but that´s another history.

But that´s the point... I´m not sure about anything. I barely know if this is possible... I hope it is. Does anyone have had any experience programming the .NET Passport API? What technologies would be required for me to work with if I´m to implement a system like this? Emphasizing that I use PHP4 and MySQL on the server side and Flash 7 on the client side (Flash Remoting for client/server comm).

Any suggestions and or any other information would be very welcome!

Thanks in advance,

Marcelo.

Best place to get that kind of info is:
http://www.passport.com/


EDIT: I don't mean to get .NET passport info from the users, but to contact Microsoft about using/implementing the .NET Passport service. As this isn't free, and you will have to pay for it (as it contains big privacy issues and stuff and all; it isn't given to anyone just like that)...

http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=passport

or the address at the bottom of:
https://accountservices.passport.net/PPPrivacyStatement.srf