New Drop of the Identity Training Kit Shows WIF in .NET 4.5, VS 2012

You asked for it, we got it done We just published on the download center a new drop of the Identity Developer Training Kit, updated to use WIF 4.5 and the new tools for VS2012 RC.

The new release contains just the absolute essential to wrap your head around the new object model and the new tools. Namely, we migrated three labs:

• Web Sites and Identity
  This is the classic WIF lab. It goes from the very basics of claims-based identity for browser based scenario to the reasonably advanced frontend-calls-backend-flowing-the user’s-identity flow, going through basic and claims-based authorization. Here there’s the list of the main news:
• The manual went from 70 to 46 pages!
• The lab no longer requires the full blown IIS, but does everything with IS Express and web applications VS project types (as opposed to web sites)
• Features the new WIF object model
• Features the new tools, and especially the new development STS whenever no special features (like ActAs) are needed
• Introduction to the Windows Azure Access Control Service 2.0
  The usual introduction to ACS. News:
• The manual went from 46 to 39 pages
• It leverages the new tool for connecting your app to ACS, making the whole task a breeze
• It sports a refreshed version of the SecurityTokenVisualizerControl, which you can reuse across your .NET 4.5 projects
• It incorporates the simplified HRD page customization flow described here
• Use the Windows Access Control Service to Federate with Multiple Business IPs
  This is the slightly more advanced ACS lab, showing how you can use a cloud federation provider to handle multiple IPs, normalize claims via rules, leverage the management service for automatic provisioning, and so on. News:
• The manual went from 55 to 46 pages
• The lab shows you how to leverage the bits of the new WIF tools for running multiple development STS at once, which I find pretty neat

Given that many of you asked for an updated version of the main labs we optimized for speed rather than completeness, hence we chose to make this available to you as soon as possible. As a result, this release is pretty minimal: there are just the three updated labs, and no presentations/videos. Given that not much has changed in term of what you can do, I am confident that you’ll be able to infer the others reasonably easily.

The web-hosted version of the training kit (the famous MSDN training course ), with all the lab manuals available as web pages and all labs unbundled in individual packages, will be published soon as well; we’ll make sure to publish it SxS with the WIF1.0 one, so that you don’t lose the reference to the in-market version of WIF.

In closing, credit where it’s due: thanks to Iaco, Pablo and Tim from Southworks for having helped with the migration; to Haishi Bai for having tested the package and the useful feedback; and to Steve DiMarco for the project handling.

Have fun with the new HOLs!