Chapter 11. Application Authentication

This chapter will look at the different ways an application can be secured to allow access only to the authorized users.

There are two main ways in which an application can be secured: Windows Identity Foundation and ASP.NET providers.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Windows Identity Foundation and Azure Access Control service

• ASP.NET providers

• Using the SQL Azure provider

• Using the Azure Storage provider

• Windows authentication

Windows Identity Foundation and Azure Access Control Service

Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a new framework from Microsoft that assists in creating applications that use Federated Authentication. It is a new technique that is gaining popularity for creating the enterprise applications that are hosted outside the corporate firewall. While hosting an application in the cloud, it is difficult to have the user log on with their active directory credentials as the Azure roles are not joined to the domain.

By using Windows...