Security Token Handlers in Geneva Framework

According to the Geneva documentation,

"SecurityTokenHandler defines an interface for plugging custom token handling functionality. Using the SecurityTokenHandler you can add functionality to serialize, de-serialize, authenticate and create and specific kind of token"

I can see dead people ..... :)

Haven't we seen this before ? Oh, yes, I think we did. The token managers in WSE, they are pretty much the same thing. It looks like the Geneva team came up with a solution that worked well in the past with WSE. One token manager for each kind of token we want to consume in our application. If your app needs to consume a custom token or customize an existing one, just derive the SecurityTokenHandler base class or one of the existing SecurityTokenHandler implementations and override some of its methods with custom functionality. For instance, the Geneva Framework now comes with two built-in token handlers for Username tokens, a MembershipUsernameSecurityTokenHandler for validating users against a membership provider and a WindowsUsernameSecurityTokenHandler for doing the same against a windows account store.

Most of the code we had in the past as part of authorization policies (IAuthorizationPolicy) for mapping claims or validating tokens in a UsernamePasswordValidator or X509CertificateValidator has now moved to token handlers in the Geneva framework.

I like this way of extending a custom handler for supporting new kind of tokens, it is quite more straightforward to me than the model currently supported by WCF.