{"id":319,"date":"2011-05-17T23:06:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-18T08:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/announcing-sample-acs-cmdlets-for-the-windows-azure-appfabric-access-control-service\/"},"modified":"2011-05-17T23:06:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-18T08:06:00","slug":"announcing-sample-acs-cmdlets-for-the-windows-azure-appfabric-access-control-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cloudidentity.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/announcing-sample-acs-cmdlets-for-the-windows-azure-appfabric-access-control-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing: Sample ACS Cmdlets for the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"powershell\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Long story short: we are releasing on Codeplex<\/a> a set of PowerShell cmdlets which wrap the management API of the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service.<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is hopefully for the joy of our IT admin friends who want to add ACS to their arsenal, but I bet that this will make many developers happy as well. I\u2019ve never really used PowerShell before, and I\u2019m using those cmdlets like crazy since the very first internal drop!<\/p>\n

You can use those new cmdlets to save repetitive provisioning processes in form of PowerShell scripts<\/strong>, and consistently reuse them just by passing as parameters the targeted namespace and corresponding management key. You can use them for backing up your namespace settings on file and restore them at a later time<\/strong>, or copy settings from one namespace to the other<\/strong>. You can easily integrate ACS management in your existing scripts<\/strong>, or even just use the cmdlets to perform quick queries and adjustments <\/strong>to your namespace directly from PowerShell ISE or the command line<\/strong>. In fact, you can do whatever you are used to do with PowerShell cmdlets \"Smile\". <\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The initial set we are releasing today is not 100% exhaustive, for example we don\u2019t touch the service identities yet, but it already enables most of the scenarios we encountered. The command names are self-explanatory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n

IPs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add-IdentityProvider
Get-IdentityProvider
Get-IdentityProviders
Remove-IdentityProvider<\/font> <\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

RPs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add-RelyingParty
Get-RelyingParties
Get-RelyingParty
Remove-RelyingParty<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Rules<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add-DefaultPassThroughRules
Add-Rule
Get-Rule
Get-Rules
Remove-Rule<\/font> <\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Rule Groups<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add-RuleGroup
Get-RuleGroup
Get-RuleGroups
Remove-RuleGroup<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

\n

Crypto<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add-TokenEncryptionKey
Add-TokenSigningKey
Get-ServiceKey
Get-ServiceKeys
Remove-ServiceKey<\/font> <\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

Utils<\/strong><\/p>\n

Get-AcsManagementToken<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

There\u2019s just 23 of them, and we might shrink them further in the future. For example: do we really need an Add-DefaultPassThroughRules cmdlet or can we just rely on Add-Rule? You tell us!
All cmdlets support get-help including the \u2013Full option, although things are not too verbose at the moment: in subsequent releases we\u2019ll tidy things up, but we wanted to put this in your hands ASAP.<\/p>\n

Now for the usual disclaimer<\/strong>:  Those cmdlets are distributed in source code form and are not part of the product. you should consider them a code sample, even if we provide you with a setup that will automatically compile and install them so that you can use them without ever opening the project in visual studio if you don\u2019t want to. Of course we are happy to take your feedback, especially now that the package is still a bit rough on the edges, but you should always remember that those cmdlets are unsupported.
Other disclaimer: this release have been thoroughly tested only on Windows 7 x64 SP1, and quickly tested on Windows 7 x86 SP1 and Windows 2008 R2 x64 SP1. There are known problems on older platforms, which we\u2019ll iron out moving forward. Think of this release as one preview.<\/p>\n

That said, I am sure you\u2019ll have a lot of fun using the cmdlets for exploring the features that ACS offers.<\/p>\n

Some More Background, and One Example<\/h2>\n

If you want to manage your ACS namespaces, there\u2019s no shortage of options: you can take advantage of the management portal (new in 2.0) or you can use the OData API exposed via management service.<\/p>\n

In my team we make pretty heavy use of ACS, both for our internal tooling (for example managing content and events) and for the samples, demos and hands on lab we produce.
In order to enable the scenario we want to implement, at setup time all of those deliverables require us to go through fixed sets of configuration steps in ACS. For example, when you use the template in the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7<\/a> to generate an ACS-ready project, the initialization code needs to:<\/p>\n