Introduction
This is the sixth post in a series about claims based identity management and the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF).
The first five were:
- Alice in Claims: decentralized identity
- Alice in Claims: the claims model
- Alice in Claims: protocols
- Alice in Claims: the anatomy of a token
- Alice in Claims: not only for federation
In this post, we introduce the Windows Identity Foundation – WIF.
Windows Identity Foundation
Contents
The Windows Identity Foundation SDK is composed by:
- The Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll .NET assembly
- The FedUtil command line tool.
- A Visual Studio add-in.
Purpose
The Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll assembly contains class models for:
- Claims-based identity representation.
- A claims and token issuance pipeline.
- A claims and token consumption pipeline.
- Host adaptation layer supporting the above generic pipelines over the ASP.NET and WCF “hosts”.
The FedUtil command line generates configuration files based on federation metadata.
Finally, the Visual Studio add-in contain templates for:
- Identity consumers – ASP.NET sites and WCF services.
- Identity producers – ASP.NET and WCF based security token services.
In the next post, we will begin our in-depth analysis of WIF by looking into the class model for claims based identity representation.