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.