Configuring an ASP.NET site to use WS-Federation

After having blogged a couple of times about how to build a simple STS, how to use claims based authentication in MVC 4.5 and how to set up federation with Azure Access Control Service, I thought it might be time to post a quick walkthrough of how to set up a simple federation with an existing STS.

Why did I think of that right now? Well, the pretty awesome “Identity and Access Tool” extension to Visual Studio has been removed from later versions of Visual Studio, making setting up federation a manual task. Unless you do it as you set up your application... And having been playing around with federation for a couple of days now in a project that wasn’t set up from scratch, I decided to just add a quick blog post on how to do a simple set up with the least amount of effort.

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Adding WCF custom service behaviors in config

Lately I have been working with a bit of WCF for a client, and one of the things I have had to do is to create a service behavior to handle some security things. However, due to the fact that this application needed to run in several different environments, it needed to have different configuration under different circumstances.

The real need was actually to be able to remove the behavior in some circumstances, and add it in some. But I didn’t really want to do it through a bunch of if-statements in my behavior. Instead I wanted it to be done through configuration so that I could turn it on and off using config transforms…

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Configuring Azure Applications

Configuring your application when running in Azure can be a little confusing to begin with, I agree. However, it isn’t really that complicated as long as you understand what config goes where and why.

In Azure, you have 3 places that affect your configuration. Actually it is in more places than that if you count machine.config files and stuff like that, but I’ll ignore that now… And to be honest, it is only 2 places, but you need to tweak 3 places to get it to work…

When you create a new Azure web application project, you get 2 projects in your solution, one “cloud project” and one Web Application Project for example, and both have some form of configuration going.

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