Building a simple custom STS using VS2012 & ASP.NET MVC

In my previous post, I walked through how “easily” one can take advantage of claims based authentication in ASP.NET. In that post, I switched out the good old forms authentication stuff for the new FedAuth stuff. In this post, I want to take it a step further and actually federate my security, but instead of just using the Windows Azure ACS’s built in identity providers, I want to build a very simple one of my own.

A lot of the solution is based on the STS project that we could get by using VS2010 and the WIF SDK. However, this project was a Web Site project using Web Forms, and I really wanted a MVC version for different reasons.

If you are fine with using VS2010 and the WIF SDK, adding a custom STS is really easy. Just create a new web project, right-click the project and choose “Add STS Reference…” and then, walking through the wizard, there will be a step that offers you to select an STS. In this step, you choose “Create a new STS project…”, which will generate a custom STS project that you can modify to your needs. Unfortunately, that option isn’t available in VS2012. Using the “Identity and Access” add-on, you are only allowed to connect to an existing STS, the ACS or a local test STS, not an STS project.

More...