Today we are excited to announce the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS August 2010 Release. This release represents a significant expansion of the capabilities of AppFabric Access Control.  As you know, we released the Access Control service back in April to full general availability, as a production, SLA-backed service.  Based upon the great feedback we’ve been getting from our customers using the service we prioritized delivering a quick update to address top customer requests. 

Highlights of this release:

• Expanded Identity provider support - allowing developers to build applications and services that accept both enterprise identities (through integration with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0), and a broad range of web identities (through support of Windows Live ID, Open ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook identities) using a single code base.
• WS-Trust and WS-Federation protocol support – Interoperable WS-* support is important to many of our enterprise customers.
• Full integration with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) - developers can apply the familiar WIF identity programming model and tooling for cloud applications and services.
• A new management web portal -  gives simple, complete control over all Access Control settings.

This release makes it easier for developers to support a broad range of security and access scenarios, and we believe it is a major step forward towards our goal of supporting “any identity, any application”.  This also extends the value that our customers get when they use cloud applications together with our full on-premises identity technology stack, including ADFS 2.0 and WIF.

Access to our LABS environment is free, and we encourage your feedback as we move this version of the service towards production. To create an account, please visit http://portal.appfabriclabs.com.

For more information on this release, please see this post on the Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog.