Today, Microsoft finally announced the first public version of their .NET identity framework code named “Zermatt”. The most important things you get from this framework are:

• APIs for the token/claims related heavy crypto lifting
• Supporting classes for claims aware applications (including an IIdentity/IPrincipal implementation to give you a common programming model and smooth migration path)
• ASP.NET plumbing for accepting tokens in web applications
• ASP.NET controls for adding Information Card support to web applications
• OM for creating Information Cards
• Framework and base classes to write security token services (for active and passive scenarios)

If you have already started looking into claims based security, this framework extends the concepts found in System.IdentityModel and makes it much easier to exploit the full power of token/claims based security systems. See here for the official announcement.

You can download the bits and a good whitepaper (written by Keith) here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=642

Stay tuned ;)