Is WIF required for CRM 2011?

The customer asked me today if WIF is really required for CRM 2011 On-Premise deployment without using Claims-based authentication. Hmm… It’s a good question, I know it’s required for CRM 2011 but I don’t really know the reason behind why WIF is required for a pure AD on-premise deployment.

So I did some research and pinged some of my Microsoft friends in the CRM product team. Found out that the reason that WIF is required for CRM is because it is used for claims-based authentication and it’s built into the CRM SDK, and it’s statically linked to the CRM binaries and there’s no easy way to separate them at this moment, therefore it’s required for all deployments.

I've learned something new today! :)