The first version of Windows Identity Foundation was released in November 2009, in form of out of band package. There were many advantages in shipping out of band, the main one being that we made WIF available to both .NET 3.5 and 4.0, to SharePoint, and so on. The other side of the coin was that it complicated redistribution (when you use WIF in Windows Azure you need to remember to deploy WIF’s runtime with your app) and that it imposed a limit to how deep claims could be wedged in the platform. Well, things have changed. Read on for some announcements that will rock your world!
No More Moon in the Water
With .NET 4.5, WIF ceases to exist as a standalone deliverable. Its classes, formerly housed in the Microsoft.IdentityModel assembly & namespace, are now spread across the framework as appropriate. The trust channel classes and all the WCF-related entities moved to System.ServiceModel.Security; almost everything else moved under some sub-namespace of System.IdentityModel. Few things disappeared, some new class showed up; but in the end this is largely the WIF you got to know in the last few years, just wedged deeper in the guts of the .NET framework. How deep?
Very deep indeed.
To get a feeling of it, consider this: in .NET 4.5 GenericPrincipal, WindowsPrincipal and RolePrincipal all derive from ClaimsPrincipal. That means that now you’ll always be able to use claims, regardless of how you authenticated the user!
In the future we are going to talk more at length about the differences between WIF1.0 and 4.5. Why did we start talking about this only now? Well, because unless your name is Dominic or Raf chances are that you will not brave the elements and wrestle with WS-Federation without some kind of tool to shield you from the raw complexity beneath. Which brings me to the first real announcement of the day.
Brand New Tools for Visual Studio 11
I am very proud to announce that today we are releasing the beta version of the WIF tooling for Visual Studio 11: you can get it from here, or directly from within Visual Studio 11 by searching for “identity” directly in the Extensions Manager.
Read more: Vibro.NET
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