Overview

This guide provides a step-by-step guide for hosting in Windows Azure a web application which accepts identities from an external identity provider by taking advantage of Windows Identity Foundation.

This is a provisional sample whose purpose is giving you a chance to experiment with federated scenarios in WA today, by using publicly available bits (Windows Azure July CTP, Geneva Framework Beta 2 codename beta release of Windows Identity Foundation). The code shown here is NOT production ready and contains various temporary compromises: you can expect many of those to become unnecessary in future releases of the products.

The guide gives very concrete indications, and is optimized for minimizing the number of steps that are necessary for getting up and running with the minimal scenario. As we get closer to general availability of the product you can expect that the same task will require fewer and simpler steps. We will occasionally add notes in the text for explaining choices rationales and indicate alternatives for the reader who is interested to understand how the solution works: if all you are interested into is getting the scenario up and running, you can ignore those notes.



A summary of the steps followed by the guide. You start by creating an ASP.NET website (RP) in the local IIS and auto-generate an STS for it. Once verified it works as expected in the local IIS, you transfer the RP settings to a WebRole and you test it in the DevFabric. Upon successful testing you publish & test the WebRole in staging and finally in production. The STS used at all stages is the one hosted by the local IIS: this is done for simplifying the deployment of this guide on dev machines, but if you have a production STS available you can certainly use it

We welcome your feedback! We will keep updating and integrating this document as the relevant technologies evolve. You can find more information here and here.