New WIF Runtime EULA Allows for Redistribution! And Since I’m at it, Let’s Talk Windows Azure Startup Tasks

Back in December one pretty important piece of news didn’t get as much air time as it would have deserved: we recently changed the WIF SDK EULA so that you can now freely (and happily) include & redistribute the WIF runtime (& samples) with your applications. Isn’t that awesome?

This came back to mind as I was presenting FabrikamShipping SaaS to some internal folks yesterday. As you recall, Monday we released the Windows Azure SDK 1.3-compliant version of the source code, where we take advantage of some of the cool new features of the platform.

One such new feature is the chance of telling Windows Azure to run some startup tasks as it brings instances to life, typically for preparing the execution environment, installing software your application needs, and so on. Can you already see where I am going with this?

From the very first version of the WIF on Windows Azure guide, one of the first problems we had to solve was to make the WIF runtime available to applications running in a Windows Azure role. The solution so far has been to set the copy local property of the WIF assembly reference to true, so that it would end up in the application package: but now that you have Startup Tasks in Windows Azure, you also have the option of installing the WIF runtime! That’s pretty neat, uh?