Announcing the Windows Azure AppFabric July release

Today we are excited to announce several updates and enhancements made to the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal and the Access Control service.

Management Portal

Localization

As announced on the Windows Azure blog: Windows Azure Platform Management Portal Updates Now Available, the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal now supports localization in 11 languages. The newly supported languages are Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. 

Users can choose their desired language from the language chooser in the top left pane of the Portal.

clip_image001

You can read about additional enhancements in the blog post: Windows Azure Platform Management Portal Updates Now Available.

Co-admin support

Customers can grant access to additional users (Co-Administrators) on the Windows Azure Management Portal as documented here: How to Setup Multiple Administrator Accounts.

These Co-administrators will now have access to the AppFabric section of the portal.

For any questions or feedback regarding the Management Portal please visit the Managing Services on the Windows Azure Platform forum.

Access Control

The following updates have been made to all ACS 2.0 namespaces.

Rules now support up to two input claims
The ACS 2.0 rules engine now supports a new type of rule that allows up to two input claims to be configured, instead of only one input claim. Rules with two input claims can be used to reduce the overall number of rules required to perform complex user authorization functions. For more information on rules with two input claims, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg185923.aspx.
Encoding is now UTF-8 for all OAuth 2.0 responses

In the initial release of ACS 2.0, the character encoding set for all HTTP responses from the OAuth 2.0 endpoint was US-ASCII. In the July 2011 release, the character encoding of HTTP responses is now set to UTF-8 to support extended character sets.

Quotas Removed

The previous quotas on configuration data have been removed in this release. This includes removal of all limitations on the number of identity providers, relying party applications, rule groups, rules, service identities, claim types, delegation records, issuers, keys, and addresses that can be created in a given ACS namespace.

Please use the following resources to learn more about this release:

For any questions or feedback regarding the Access Control service please visit the Security for the Windows Azure Platform forum.

If you have not signed up for Windows Azure AppFabric and would like to start using these new capabilities, be sure to take advantage of our free trial offer. Just click on the image below and get started today!

clip_image002

The AppFabric Team