Yesterday I had my Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) talk at MSDN Live in Stavanger. My last slide on that talk listed a set of resources to help you get started and understand WIF, Claims based Identity, Federation, Security Token Services (STS) etc, so I thought I’d share them here:

Tools and frameworks

WIF
Shouldn’t be too hard to find, but I provide the link anyways. This is formerly known as the Geneva Framework.

WIF SDK
This SDK will add some nice tooling support to Visual Studio for adding a reference to a Security Token Service (FedUtil). There is also a set of coding examples as part of this download.

AD FS 2.0 RC
Formerly known as Geneva Server, this is Microsoft’s Security Token Service with Active Directory integration.

StarterSTS
This is a open source project created by the security expert Dominick Baier from ThinkTecture. What makes this project interesting (except from using WIF to implement an STS) is that it has full support for the ASP.NET membership provider as well as having a OpenID bridge and a REST endpoint. On this web site you’ll also find a good collection of screen casts by Dominick showing you how to do various things in/with StarterSTS.

Books, whitepapers and coding examples

A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control (PDF Book)
This is a real must to get a proper understanding of WIF, SSO and Federation. They’ve done a great job explaining these concepts in a simple manner. This without using the many technical terms within the security domain throughout the paper, but rather spend time in the beginning to explain them so you have the proper understanding should you run across these terms in other resources.

Identity Developer Training Kit
This training kit (updated in March) have some great examples of how to do Active and/or Passive federation in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WCF and Azure. Highly recommended learning resource.

A collection of Whitepapers (older but still valuable)
The download includes:

• David Chappell’s Claims Based Identity for Windows
• Keith Brown and Sesha Mani’s WIF Whitepaper for Developers
• Windows Identity Foundation – Changes between Beta 2 and RTW