Summary

Taking advantage of existing identities in new applications is one of the fundamental requirements in today’s distributed systems, and the new wave of cloud based services is no exception.

By completing this hands-on lab you have learned:

• How to externalize authentication for a Windows Azure Web Role application, by taking advantage of Windows Identity Foundation for federating with an external authority (here simulated by a development STS).
• [Optional] How to deploy such an application in Windows Azure and take care of the operations (such as deploying certificates) that are necessary for making the application work as expected in federated and SSO scenarios.

As you have discovered while going through the lab, the claims-based approach to identity enabled by Windows Identity Foundation can be applied with little or no modification to both on-premises or cloud application.

We hope that the programming skills you learned in this and the other identity labs will enable you to write solutions with the confidence that no matter where your application will end up being deployed, you took care of identity in consistent and effective manner.