Howdy folks,

We have exciting news for our developer community today!

JSON Web Token Handler GA's

After five months in the developer preview program, the JSON Web Token (JWT) Handler v1.0 is now complete and has GA'd! You can use the JWT handler NuGet in your production applications whenever you need a REST-friendly, lightweight token format to carry authentication and user info.

The programming surface has not changed much, save for targeted improvements in key areas. All samples (in common with AAL .NET) have been updated to demonstrate the intended usage of the library.

AAL .NET Preview Refresh

We've also updated the Windows Azure Authentication Library (AAL) for .NET preview to bring it to par with the AAL for Windows Store apps: you can now take advantage of our OAuth2 code grant endpoints (also in preview) from your desktop applications. All of our samples on the MSDN code gallery have been updated to reflect the new features.

As we get closer to release AAL .NET, we are refining the API surface to match the service capabilities we will have available at GA. As one example, in this refresh we are removing the WS-Trust based flows for ACS2.0 namespaces. We’ll have a blog post soon that explains the relationship between ACS namespaces and Windows Azure AD tenants in depth, so stay tuned for that.

For more details on both AAL.NET and the JWT Handler please refer to this post .

Thank you to everyone who has given us feedback on our work in both these areas. It was instrumental in shaping up the feature set of the first release of our JWT Handler!

Best regard,

Alex Simons (twitter: Alex_A_Simons)

Director of Program Management

Active Directory