SAML Authentication for a .NET Application

It should be possible to use SAML to authenticate users for any type of application (according to the spec), but the examples I have seen are cookie-based ASP.NET web-sites.

Does anyone know of an example authentica开发者_开发知识库ting users for, say, a Win Forms app (not using cookies)?

Not quite sure what it is you are looking for. If you are looking for SAML based authentication, you can use some combination of Windows Identity Framework and WCF and AD FS. SAML is just the "language" of authentication, but unless you already have an identity provider, you need to start there first.

You can use this article to give you an idea of what the basic infrastructure looks like, and I frequently use the site leastprivilege.com for a deeper reference.

But, if the scope of your application is purely within the desktop (ie, never communicates with any services) you really don't need anything like SAML to achieve your goal. Usage of tokens like SAML are for communicating with web services where the endpoints trust the identity provider.

SAML is a wee complicated beastie. I'm not sure I'd try to roll my own SAML SSO solution.

When we implemented SAML SSO, we used PingFederate from. It's expensive, but good. There's also some open source SAML SSO stuff about, but I can't really speak to it.

PingFederate is pretty dead simple to configure and use, although if you don't speak SAML, the learning curve will be steep until you understand the concepts, the flow and the lingo used.