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 Identity Foundation and Azure Access Control Service (ACS) , it is possible to federate the authentication of the users to an on-premise active directory. Azure ACS handles the authentication of users to the remote user directories, and passes a valid security token to your application. The Azure ACS can also be used to federate the authentication to not just an active directory of a single corporation, but to multiple corporations if enabled correctly. This allows a...
