First published on CloudBlogs on Mar, 13 2015
Howdy folks,
What a week it's been here in the Identity and Security Division. Just so much cool stuff to tell you about.
I thought I'd end the week with a post that rounds up a bunch of Azure AD news for developers. In the last couple of weeks we've been shipping new, productivity enhancing features for developers that you might not be aware of:
-
New identity tools, templates and libraries in the latest Visual Studio 2015 preview
-
A refreshed preview of ADAL .NET v3 – with new iOS and .NET core features.
Here's some of the details you'll want to know about both.
Identity Features in Visual Studio 2015 CTP6
In the last few months, we've been closely collaborating with teams across the C&E Division to ensure that Visual Studio 2015 will deliver an unparalleled experience when it comes to using identity in your projects.
For details, please head to
this post
on the ASP.NET & Web Dev Tools team blog. In a nutshell:
-
We now have
OpenID Connect
and
OAuth2
bearer token middleware components you can use with ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core. You can find new samples
here
and
here
.
-
The
ASP.NET 4.6 templates
have been updated: the authentication logic they generate is now based on the OWIN middleware and OpenId Connect, instead of Windows Identity Foundation.
-
The "Change Authentication" dialog takes better advantage of the built in identity management features in Visual Studio 2015. Furthermore, it enables you to add
delegated permissions
to your application.
-
The authentication logic generated via the ASP.NET 4.6 templates is now the same as the one generated by the "Configure Azure AD Authentication…" dialog, allowing you to modify your authentication settings at any time of a project lifetime
This is still a CTP release, hence the features aren't yet where we want them to be, but at this point you should start to have a good idea of what you are going to get in the final product.
ADAL .NET v3 Preview – March Refresh
Back in October I
announced
the preview of the next generation of our ADAL .NET libraries, with additional support via Xamarin for iOS and Android development.
Today we are refreshing our preview, adding a couple of highly requested features:
-
Support for Xamarin Unified API for iOS
. As of February the 1
st
, Apple requires that all apps published on iTunes support 64 bits. The old Xamarin iOS project type ("Classic"), on which the first ADAL v3 preview was based, did not support that. With this refresh, ADAL moves to the new Xamarin Unified API for iOS - which does support 64 bits. You can see the new API in action in the updates sample
here
.
-
ADAL support for .NET Core.
Earlier I mentioned that we have brand new OWIN middleware for OpenId Connect and OAuth2 bearer token in ASP.NET 5 and .NET core. That helps for protecting your Web apps and API, but what about consuming Web API? You need ADAL for that. In this refresh we added support for .NET Core, so that you can run ADAL in your ASP.NET 5 projects and consume API from Azure, Office 365 and any other API protected by Azure AD. For a demonstration of this new capability, see this
new sample
.
For more details, please refer to
this deep dive post
.
I hope that these new features will make it easier for you to take advantage of Azure Active Directory in your application, from more and more platforms. As we're still in preview, the best time for giving feedback is now! And as always, we would love receive any feedback or suggestions you have.
Best regards,
Alex Simons (Twitter:
@Alex_A_Simons
)
Director of Program Management
Microsoft Identity and Security Division
