Announcing .NET Core Support for the IdentityServer4 SAML Component

Rock Solid Knowledge is pleased to announce the first preview release of the IdentityServer4.Saml built using .NET Standard 2.0. This means the component now supports .NET 4.6.1 and above, and .NET Core 2.0 and above. This has been a much-requested feature that we’ve been working hard to release, so we’re excited to hear feedback.

What took so long?

Back in late February, Microsoft finally released .NET Core support for WS-Federation, and, along with it, a port of many of the SAML and XML cryptography libraries that we used within our SAML component. However, it turned out porting the SAML component to .NET Standard wasn’t as simple as installing these new packages and changing the target framework.

The biggest issue was that all of the metadata libraries were missing, and while this might sound like a minor issue, on closer inspection, it was quite a task to port these ancient Microsoft libraries (check out the 3300-line long MetadataSerializer for example).

Luckily we weren’t alone in this challenge, and using ongoing community work and the MIT licensed Microsoft .NET Framework code, we were able to port a basic version of this library, keeping the APIs as similar to the existing System.IdentityModel.Metadata library as possible.

At the moment, this port is available as a separate, open-source package; however, this may later be merged into the core library.

Other issues included inconsistencies between the new cryptography libraries when running on .NET Framework or .NET Core, meaning runtime specific code had to be developed.

Nuget and Licensing

You can download the IdentityServer4.Saml component from nuget, and instruction of installation in our documentation.

To request a demo license, please email [email protected].

If you haven’t seen the work we’ve been putting into the SAML component, check out our recent release notes. Feature requests are welcomed.

If you have any issues, let us know!