Someone one posed an interesting question to me the other day, around whether or not you could use SAML claims with host header sites in SharePoint 2010. My initial thought was yes but I wanted to dig into it a little bit more to investigate. The short...

Hey folks wanted to let you know about some other federation whitepapers that have come out recently. Please see the following if interested: ADFS with Shibboleth - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/card/archive/2010/10/22/ad-fs-2-0-step-by-step-guide-federation...

Hey folks, I just wanted to let you know that CA SiteMinder and Microsoft folks have been working together to create a whitepaper that details how to federate identities between CA Federation Manager and SharePoint 2010. They have recently released this...

A scenario that is happening more frequently in SharePoint 2010 is using a single zone for multiple authentication providers. One of the reasons folks do this is because they want to use a some type of claims authentication - like FBA or SAML - but they...

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...

NOTE: As usual the formatting on this site sucks. I recommend you download the Word document attachment with this posting for better reading. I had been looking at Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) with an interesting eye recently, thinking...

SIDE NOTE: Yet another kudos to the fabulous folks that run this site. This latest version now retains even LESS formatting from Word and Visual Studio than before! I didn't think it was possible to make this site any worse than it was, and yet you've...

I recently came across a very nice troubleshooting methodology when I was trying to debug some authentication issues that were occurring during a SharePoint 2010 crawl. I was getting some errors and also having difficulty getting the information I needed...

Just a quick tip here to save you a little time in case you decide you want to add additional claims for your users in ADFS 2.0 and have them successfully consumed in SharePoint 2010. The key thing to remember is that SharePoint only supports SAML 1.x...

Just the subject line of this post is a mouthful, if it’s any indication of what we’re going to be covering today. This post is going to address an issue that has long bothered myself and others. I just recently started asking around about...

I’ve done this task a variety of ways over the past year but finally decided that I should just do things the “right” way. The task is simply enough – when your custom claims provider is being invoked, like during claims augmentation...

A fairly constant hurdle when doing claims augmentation in SharePoint 2010 has been trying to figure out what claims a user has when your custom claims provider is invoked to do claims augmentation. For example, the claims you want to augment for a person...

I’ve been asked this question a couple times before, which is I want to be able to programmatically find out what claims providers are being used with my web application. This question is usually asked to mean what SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuers...

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...

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...

Hey all, for those of you have followed this blog over the last couple of years, you know I've covered a lot of different topics about SharePoint. Today's post then is probably the "kitchen sink", as in I've covered everything but the kitchen sink, until...

I've had this happen a number of times and it always temporarily gets me gummed up so I thought I would describe this problem and resolution here because I'm sure others have seen it too. Assume you have configured a SharePoint web app to use SAML...

I noticed an unusual wrinkle recently when using Secure Store Service (SSS) in a custom claims provider I was working on. This is actually an interesting scenario because I was doing what many folks want to do - custom claims augmentation. I needed to...

I fought with this recently and didn't find any info about it out in the ether anywhere so just thought I'd share in case someone else runs across it. Assume you have SharePoint installed in a classic resource forest scenario. So the SharePoint farm is...

For those of you who have been developing solutions for SharePoint 2010 with Visual Studio 2010, you may have noticed a slight packaging peculiarity when it comes to custom claims providers. In Visual Studio 2010 you can create a new feature and you can...

In part 1 of ULS logging tips ( http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2011/01/23/tips-for-uls-logging.aspx ) I included a some code to add a custom ULS logging Area and demonstrated how to use it within your project. After working with it a bit...

Hey folks, as some of you may know I work with the SharePoint Online team at Microsoft. We're currently looking for some fresh SharePoint savvy engineers to join our team and help design and build the next generation of SharePoint in the cloud services...

In the work I’ve been busy with lately I’ve had a lot of interest from folks that are interested in starting out as Windows claims users, and then at some point switching over and start using SAML claims. Sounds reasonable enough, but the...

UPDATE 2-4-2011: I recommend taking a look at the updated example for this at http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2011/02/04/tips-for-uls-logging-part-2.aspx . The new example is better and more functional. When I added some ULS logging to...

I had this all too common problem hit me this weekend, but this was happening on my ADFS server, which I unfortunately was rebuilding. The most common reasons as you know have to do with some misconfigured Kerberos setting, or with using some name other...