BenkoTIPS

Access Control Services is one of the many services that are part of the Windows Azure Platform which handles an authentication conversation for you, allowing you an easy way to integrate cloud identity from providers like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Live ID with your application. You need an active Azure Subscription (click here to try the 90 day Free Trial), add an ACS service namespace, then add a Secure Token Service (STS) reference to your  application (you’ll need the Windows Identity SDK and tools for Visual Studio to add the Federation Utility that does that last part – download here).

If you’ve seen an error that says ‘Unable to find assembly Microsoft.IdentityModel’ and wondered what’s the deal? In the documentation for working with a Secure Token Service (STS) you might have seen that this assembly is not part of the default deployment of your Windows Azure package, and that you’ll need to add the reference to your project and set the deployment behavior to deploy a local copy with the application…all good, right?

So you follow the instructions and still get the error. One reason for this is that you might be seeing an error caused by calling methods from the serviceRuntime which changes the appdomain of your webrole. In that case you should consider adding a Startup Task to load the WIF assembly in the Global Assembly Cache.

The basic logic is that in the startup of the web role you’ll need to inject a startup task to run the gacutil executable to do the installation. I created a startup folder in my web project to contain the scripts and files necessary, including a copy of gacutil.exe, a configuration file for it, and a batch file “IdentityGac.cmd” to contain the script commands needed.

I copied the gactuil.exe and config files from my C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin\x64 directory, and put them in the Startup folder. Next I created a cmd file (in notepad) with the commands to install the assembly into the GAC. I found a post that discusses how to create a script to do the installation on http://blogs.infosupport.com/adding-assemblies-to-the-gac-in-windows-azure/ where it installs the Windows Identity files and then sets the windows update service to on demand, installs the SDK, then runs gacutil.

    @echo off
    sc config wuauserv start= demand
    wusa.exe "%~dp0Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu" /quiet /norestart
    sc config wuauserv start= disabled
    e:\approot\bin\startup\gacutil /if e:\Approot\bin\Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll

I add these files to the Startup folder, and then open the properties for the 3 files and set the build action to none and “Copy to Output Directory” to Copy Always. This ensures that these files will be present in the deployed instance for my startup task. Next we edit the startup tasks in the Service Definition file, adding a section for <Startup>, and a <Task… to run our script file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ServiceDefinition name="MplsKickSite.Azure" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition">
  <WebRole name="MplsKickSite" vmsize="ExtraSmall">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="80" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Startup>
      <Task commandLine="Startup\IdentityGac.cmd" executionContext="elevated" taskType="simple">
      </Task>
    </Startup>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
      <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" />
      <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" />
    </Imports>
  </WebRole>
</ServiceDefinition>

In Steve Marx’s post on Startup Task Tips & Tricks he suggests that when debugging a new startup task to set the taskType to background instead of simple so that it won’t prevent Remote Desktop from getting configured. If you’re interested to download the Startup folder I used I’ve uploaded a zip archive file with the files here.

Happy Coding!