Summary

This chapter looked at a variety of options for enabling user authentication within your application.

Using WIF and Azure ACS is the preferred solution, however, the limited support for Silverlight may be a hindrance to their adoption.

When WIF is not an option, the ASP.NET provider model allows a developer to easily configure where user credentials and other information is stored. SQL Azure and Azure Storage were both offered as different solutions, with SQL Azure as the preferred option, as it is the one supported by Microsoft through the use of the universal providers. It was also noted that while SQL Azure is able to hold the session state, that AppFabric caching may be a better solution and should be explored.

The final chapter will introduce the use of Azure AppFabric caching to improve the application's performance.