Taking Control over Azure Access Control Service HRD (without the Help from jQuery)

Vittorio wrote a post earlier today showing how to fetch the identity provider feed from ACS and use it to drive the sign-in handshake from within your application and UI.

This is indeed a very useful (and user friendly) approach. Call me old fashioned, but I’d rather like to do that using C#/server side ;)

I wrote a simple class that turns the ACS identity provider feed into an object model. In essence the logic looks like this:

public async Task<List<IdentityProviderInformation>> GetAsync(
  string protocol)

{

    var url = string.Format(

        “https://{0}.{1}/v2/metadata/IdentityProviders.js?protocol={2}&realm={3}&context={4}&version=1.0”,

        AcsNamespace,

        “accesscontrol.windows.net”,

        protocol,

        Realm,

        Context);

    var jsonFormatter = new JsonMediaTypeFormatter();

    jsonFormatter.SupportedMediaTypes.Add(
      new MediaTypeHeaderValue(“text/javascript”));

    var formatters = new List<MediaTypeFormatter>()

    {

        jsonFormatter

    };

    var client = new HttpClient();

    var response = await client.GetAsync(new Uri(url));

    return await
      response.Content.ReadAsAsync<List<IdentityProviderInformation>>(
        formatters);

}

From there you can data bind to a UI control (e.g. WPF, WP, WebForms) or pass on to a MVC view (honoring the MVC model ;)).

Here’s the full source code, and here a WPF client sample.

HTH