With Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft has provided a new “Change Authentication” wizard that is part of all ASP.NET projects. This includes an option for “Organizational Accounts”, which in essence means federation using the WS-Federation protocol. This wizard replaces the previous “Identity and Access Control” Visual Studio extension.

The unfortunate part of this is that the “Identity and Access Control” tool used to contain a test STS. This test STS ran locally and thus a full STS did not need to be installed and configured. It even had the ability to configure in a file the users and claims to issue, which was quite convenient for testing and checking into source control.

At Thinktecture we were saddened by the loss of such a useful tool, so we decided to open source a similar tool that we had built for one of our clients (with permission from and many thanks to that…