The Azure Active Directory (AAD) team has made the first release of their product. Along the way they’ve added functionality that allows you to configure AAD as an identity provider in ACS. With these features, AAD and ACS become a natural combination to use with SharePoint when you are interested...

In my posting on using SharePoint up in Azure IaaS services ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2012/06/17/creating-an-azure-persistent-vm-for-an-isolated-sharepoint-farm.aspx ), one of my friends – Mike Taghizadeh, who demands that he be mentioned :-) – noticed that I didn’t...

The first step in being able to create a persistent VM in Azure is to get your account upgraded to take advantage of these features, which are all in preview. Once the features are enabled you can follow this process to get the various components configured to support running an isolated SharePoint farm...

In Part 1 of this series, I briefly outlined the goals for this project, which at a high level is to use Windows Azure table storage as a data store for a SharePoint custom claims provider. The claims provider is going to use the CASI Kit to retrieve the data it needs from Windows Azure in order to provide...

In Part 1 of this series, I briefly outlined the goals for this project, which at a high level is to use Windows Azure table storage as a data store for a SharePoint custom claims provider. The claims provider is going to use the CASI Kit to retrieve the data it needs from Windows Azure in order to provide...

Hi all, it’s been a while since I’ve added new content about SAML claims, so I decided to come back around and write some more about it in a way that links together some of my favorite topics – SharePoint, SAML, custom claims providers, the CASI Kit and Azure. This is the first part...

I wanted to document this error here because I recently went nearly blind trying to solve it, and I never did find the exact cause when Bing'ing for it. Unfortunately it's a pretty generic error so it may very well have been out there, but it seems there are several reasons for it. In my case I created...

I had a problem that unfortunately I've seen a few people run across when using the AppFabric caching feature of Windows Azure. This is the release version of the caching mechanism formerly known as Velocity. When you have a problem with the caching factory that it uses, most frequently the error message...

Just wanted to update folks with the announcement made at the SharePoint Conference yesterday regarding the CASI Kit. I have decided to release everything for it - full source code to the base class, the web part, and all of the sample projects - up to CodePlex. If you go to casikit.codeplex.com now...

Hi folks, I just wanted to let you know that I will be making a major announcement for the CASI Kit at next week's SharePoint Conference 2011. If you are down there come by session SPC 412 - SharePoint, Azure and Claims Integration for Developers on Wednesday at 3:15PM to catch the news. For those of...

I know that there have been a number of posts and articles out there about using diagnostics in Windows Azure. This, in fact, was part of the problem when I went to flesh out the details of what’s available recently. I found a bunch of different articles, but spread across many different releases...

In the first post in this series ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2011/05/05/federated-saml-authentication-with-sharepoint-2010-and-azure-access-control-service-part-1.aspx ) I described how to configure SharePoint to establish a trust directly with the Azure Access Control (ACS) service...

Someone raised an interesting question the other day about the ability of a WCF application, that's configured as described in Eric White's blog ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericwhite/archive/2010/06/18/establishing-trust-between-a-wcf-web-service-and-the-sharepoint-2010-security-token-service.aspx ) and...

One of the interesting challenges when trying to troubleshoot remotely connected systems is figuring out what they're saying to each other. The CASI Kit that I've posted about other times on this blog ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2010/11/06/the-claims-azure-and-sharepoint-integration...

This post is most useful when used as a companion to my five-part series on the CASI (Claims, Azure and SharePoint Integration) Kit. · Part 1 : an introductory overview of the entire framework and solution and described what the series is going to try and cover. · Part 2 : the guidance...

This is part 5 of a 5 part series on the CASI (Claims, Azure and SharePoint Integration) Kit. · Part 1 : an introductory overview of the entire framework and solution and described what the series is going to try and cover. · Part 2 : the guidance part of the CASI Kit. It starts with...

This is part 4 of a 5 part series on the CASI (Claims, Azure and SharePoint Integration) Kit. · Part 1 : an introductory overview of the entire framework and solution and described what the series is going to try and cover. · Part 2 : the guidance part of the CASI Kit. It starts with...

This is part 3 of a 5 part series on the CASI (Claims, Azure and SharePoint Integration) Kit. · Part 1 : an introductory overview of the entire framework and solution and described what the series is going to try and cover. · Part 2 : the guidance part of the CASI Kit. It starts with...

This is part 2 of a 5 part series on the CASI (Claims, Azure and SharePoint Integration) Kit. · Part 1 : an introductory overview of the entire framework and solution and described what the series is going to try and cover. · Part 2 : the guidance part of the CASI Kit. It starts with...

This is the first in a series of blog posts that I’m actually pretty excited about and I hope when all is said and done you will be too. I’ve been working the last couple of months on a new framework for connecting SharePoint and Windows Azure together, and also incorporating claims identity...

I just wanted to pass on a couple of tips for Azure development that I've recently found to be helpful. The first is around connection strings. When you use a connection string, you typically store it in the project properties. The labs usually demonstrate reading the connection strings with something...