Share via

Windows Azure AppFabric April release now available featuring a new version of the Access Control service!

  • Article

We are excited to announce that today we released the Windows Azure AppFabric April release that includes a new version of the Access Control service.

The new version of the Access Control service includes all the great capabilities and enhancements that have been available in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the service for several months. Now you can start using these capabilities using our production service.

The new version of the service adds the following capabilities:

Federation provider and Security Token Service

  • Out of box federation with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook

New authorization scenarios

  • Delegation using OAuth 2.0

Improved developer experience

  • New web-based management portal
  • Fully programmatic management using OData
  • Works with Windows Identity Foundation

Additional protocol support

  • WS-Federation, WS-Trust, OpenID 2.0, OAuth 2.0 (Draft 13)

 We will share more on this release, including new content that will help you get started with the service in the near future.

The new version of the Access Control service will run in parallel with the previous version. Existing customers will not be automatically migrated to the new version, and the previous version remains fully supported. You will see both versions of the service in the AppFabric Management Portal.

We encourage you to try the new version of the service and will be offering the service at no charge during a promotion period ending January 1, 2012. Customers using the previous version of the service will also enjoy the promotion period.

Please use the following resources to learn more about this release:

Another change introduced in this release is in the way we calculate the monthly charge for Service Bus. From now on the computation of the daily connection charge will always assume a month of 31 days, instead of using the actual number of days in the current month. This is done in order to ensure consistency in the charges across months. You can find more details of how the Service Bus charges are calculated in our Detailed FAQs

In addition, we have deprecated the ASP.NET Management Portal as part of this release. From now on only the new Silverlight based Management Portal will be available. The new portal has the same management capabilities as the ASP.NET management portal, but with an enhanced and improved experience. All links to the Management Portal should work and direct you to the new Silverlight portal. 

The updates are available at: https://appfabric.azure.com, so be sure to login and start using the new capabilities.

If you have any questions, be sure to visit our Windows Azure Platform Forums. For questions specifically on the Access Control service visit the Security for the Windows Azure Platform section of the forums. 

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using these great new capabilities, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

The Windows Azure AppFabric Team.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2011
    Hi Interesting. Regarding the Windows AppFabric SDK could / should I have both version 1.0 and 2.0 installed or just one of them ? Beacuse both versions of acs is now deployed in the "production" portal. //Nikbra

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2011
    Hi, can You tell me, where is the option for choosing ACS version, when i am creating it? Is there and I am blind or it will be there soon? Thanks for reply :-)

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2011
    The April 2011 release of ACS (version 2.0) does not require a dedicated SDK download.  To manage ACS you can use the new management portal, or you can code to the management API.  For building relying party applications, you can use the Windows Identity Foundation SDK.  For samples on how to use the management API or build relying party applications, see our Codeplex project at http://acs.codeplex.com.

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2011
    Due to a temporary issue with the AppFabric Portal, only ACS 2.0 namespaces can be created at this time.  This will be addressed in a future release.  Until then, if you need to create an ACS 1.0 namespace please contact customer support at go.microsoft.com/fwlink.  For more information on differences between ACS 1.0 and ACS 2.0, see this MSDN topic:  msdn.microsoft.com/.../gg185940.aspx.