Windows Azure AppFabric July 2011 Updates Live

Customers using Windows Azure AppFabric are now able to leverage a range of enhancements recently introduced by Microsoft.

Both the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal and the Access Control service have been kicked up a notch, the software giant revealed.

No less than three updates to ACS 2.0 namespaces are bound to improve the experience associated with Access Control service.

According to the Redmond company, the updated ACS 2.0 namespaces enable users to use up to two input claims for rules, to take advantage of the extended character sets of UTF-8, and the scraping of various limitations.

“The ACS 2.0 rules engine now supports a new type of rule that allows up to two input claims to be configured, instead of only one input claim. Rules with two input claims can be used to reduce the overall number of rules required to perform complex user authorization functions,” Microsoft said.

“In the initial release of ACS 2.0, the character encoding set for all HTTP responses from the OAuth 2.0 endpoint was US-ASCII. In the July 2011 release, the character encoding of HTTP responses is now set to UTF-8 to support extended character sets.

“The previous quotas on configuration data have been removed in this release. This includes removal of all limitations on the number of identity providers, relying party applications, rule groups, rules, service identities, claim types, delegation records, issuers, keys, and addresses that can be created in a given ACS namespace,” the software giant.

In addition, as a part of the overall revamping of the Windows Azure Management Portal, the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal also evolved.

The new Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal offers support for 11 languages, including Japanese, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

On top of the new localization options, Microsoft has also made it possible for the co-administrators set through the Windows Azure Management Portal to also access the AppFabric section.