Summary

In this chapter, we examined the Windows Azure AppFabric. The two services that comprise AppFabric are Access Control and Service Bus. Access Control issues signed web tokens (SWT) as part of a claims-based identity system, and can be used by applications hosted both on Azure and on premises. Access Control currently supports symmetric key and ADFS v2, and the stated long-term goal is to federate the major identity providers, greatly reducing the amount of time and work in order for our applications to support these identity providers. We then configured Access Control to be used by our delivery confirmation application.

We also examined the Service Bus, which facilitates communications between applications located in two different enterprises. The Service Bus can operate as a message relay or a connection broker, and these functions may be of interest to us in a future phase of our project.