Windows : Ctrl - Alt - Del on a VM

If you use Remote Desktop a lot and you get a message about your password needing to change, you can't use:

Ctrl - Alt - Del

because that will change the password on your actual PC - not the box you are RDC'ing to.

All the documentation states:

Ctrl - Alt - End

but sometimes that simply doesn't work.

In such cases, in the RDC window, try Start - Run - OSK.

This pops up the On Screen Keyboard.

Than hold down Ctrl and Alt on your actual keyboard and then click Delete on the OSK.

Job done!

Enjoy!

ADFS : Non domain-joined proxy

All our proxies are domain-joined albeit in a different zone.

Recently, I was involved with a client whose proxy was non-domain joined i.e. a workgroup.

When installing the proxy, you need to enter the credentials of the ADFS service account.

Battled to get this to work and then I remembered that this was not domain-joined and consequently, you needed to enter the sAMAccountName in the form:

domain\user

where the domain is the one that ADFS is installed in.

That did the trick.

Enjoy!

OWIN : WS Federation support

Vittorio blogged on this:

Using Claims in your Web App is Easier with the new OWIN Security Components

There's a good reference to OWIN in the above.

WS-Federation in Microsoft OWIN Components–a quick start

But what the article doesn't show is how to display the claims.

Dominick blogged on this:

Test driving the WS-Federation Authentication Middleware for Katana

Horrible hack below - yeah I know! - I put it in the About page in the HomeController ...

public ActionResult About()
{
     ViewBag.Message = "Your application description page.";

     var ctx = Request.GetOwinContext();

     var user = ctx.Authentication.User;
     var response = ctx.Response;

     response.ContentType = "text/html";

     if (user.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
    {
         ... code as above
    }

Enjoy!