Requesting a SAML token from ADFS in C#

NOTE: The code for my ADFS experiments is available at github

The problem

I set out to integrate a new .net web api project (and the client application consuming it) with ADFS authentication. Since I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of ADFS tokens & using them with web apis, I chose not to use any “designer tools” in Visual Studio. Here’s what I’d like to achieve:

• client application authenticates for the first time with username/password
• use credentials to request security token from ADFS
• convert the token to JWT format for usage in HTTP headers

Getting the token

Requesting the token is actually pretty easy once you use a little WCF magic (and know your ADFS endpoint). Here is the code for my TokenProvider. Please note that I use the excellent “Thinktecture.IdentityModel” nuget package.

In the next post I will explain how to convert this token to JWT format.