ACS Configuration For Development and Production Or Staging

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Programming Windows Azure - Programming the Microsoft Cloud

During the work on Securing Windows Azure Web Role ASP.NET Web Application Using Access Control Service v2.0 I needed to handle both Compute Emulator and actual Windows Azure deployment in the context of ACS. By handle I mean that I needed to constantly change web.config entries and those that are managed by ACS Management Portal.

To reduce the amount of places I need to go and change configuration values I have created two Relying Parties – one for dev and one for Windows Azure. The difference between the two was in Return URL and Realm.

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If you will try to assign same realm values to both Relying Parties you will receive an error:

There is already a Relying Party with this Realm.

Before deploying to Windows Azure I needed to make teh following changes in web.config:

  • value attribute in add node under audienceUri.
  • realm attribute in wsFederation node under federatedAuthentication.

These manipulations probably caused me to do some troubleshooting as outlined in Invalid Web.Config Caused Failure To Deploy ASP.NET App To Windows Azure: “All role instances have stopped”, “Busy”, “Aborted”, “Recovering role...”, “Preparing node…”, so make sure you deploy valid web.config to Windows Azure next time.