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Where is the Add STS reference option in Visual Studio 2012?

In Visual Studio 2012 the Add STS reference… option is replaced by a completely new tool: The Identity and Access Tool.

The Identity and Access Tool for Visual Studio 2012 enables you to secure your application with claims based identity and accept users from multiple identity providers.

This extension adds a context sensitive project menu entry to easily add identity capabilities to your Web Applications, MVC Applications and WCF Services. This will provide you with capabilities for developing and testing your application with a Local Development STS, connecting to a corporate identity provider like ADFS2 and using the Windows Azure Access Control Service to connect to other identity provides such as LiveID, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. It does this by updating your web.config file with the proper settings to enable the Windows Identity Foundation in .NET 4.5 and adding the necessary configuration for the identity provider you select.

This tool is not available out-of-the-box. So you have to install it from the Extension Manager in Visual Studio:

    • From the menu select TOOLS | Extensions and Updates. . .
    • Click the Online extensions node in the tree view on the left.
    • Search for “Identity and Access Tool” in the search field in the upper right
    • Click the Download button to download and install the package.
    • Click Restart Now to Restart Visual Studio.

    After restarting Visual Studio, you should now see the Identity and Access. . . option if you right-click on your project.

    IdentityAndAccessTool

    Remark: If the option is not there after installing the extension, check if the target framework for your project is set to .NET 4.5.  I first tried it on a .NET 4.0 project and lost a lot of time investigating why the option was not available.

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