(I’ve run into these issue enough times that I thought I’d do a quick post about as it can be incredibly frustrating if you don’t know how to resolve this issue.)
As you may know I do a lot of work with Azure and, in particular, the Access Control Service (ACS). I’m a huge fan of ACS because it is a great way to offload authentication and authorization from your web sites. In order secure your web sites with ACS you need to download and install the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) runtime and sdk. Once installed, you’ll get some nice templates in Visual Studio. You’ll also get a context menu option to add a Secure Token Service (STS) reference to your web site. This is typically what you use to integrated your web sites with ACS (unless you like crafting your web configuration files by hand, which I don’t recommend.) Every now and then, typically after I install some update or additional tools for Visual Studio, the add STS reference option disappears. As evidences in the picture below.
I can’t replicate the scenario that removes the context menu option from Visual Studio. I just know it’s happened to me 5-6 times.
The resolution is simple enough:
- Run the Visual Studio Command Prompt as an administrator
- Run the following command: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv” /ResetAddin Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tools.VS.VSAddin.FederationAddin
After you’ve executed the steps above, open a project containing a web site in Visual Studio, right-click on the project, and you should be good to go:
Hope this helps resolves what can be a very frustrating issue quickly.
ag