ASP.NET 4 provides a new Identity Authentication/Authorization framework that's very comprehensive and works reasonably well for new applications. However, if you have existing applications or use custom user management, it's not very clear how to use just the basic OWIN Authentication/Authorization layer without the full UserManager and Entity Framework implementation. In this post I describe how to use the bare minimum Identity features to hook up a custom domain model for both local and external logins in an ASP.NET MVC application.

Spend a little time over the weekend re-running some of my ASP.NET raw throughput benchmarks on my new machine and found some interesting results. Much faster, but also some surprises with self-hosting and efficiency surprises with various Web API approaches.

During last week's MVP summit Microsoft showed a new light weight, Owin host called Helios, that can run directly on the IIS core without using the ASP.NET Runtime. It's light weight and fast, and offers a glimpse into where Microsoft is heading for building a more nimble and componentized runtime that is bound to be more flexible and agile. In this post I describe how to set up Helios to play around with and some of the implications it brings.

Self-hosting SignalR is easy enough, but using a self hosted server under SSL/HTTPS requires a little extra configuration. This post shows what you need to know.

Being able to Self-Host SignalR in standalone applications on the server side opens up all sorts of opportunities for dashboard and notification style applications. In this post I show an example of a Windows Service that integrates SignalR to provide real time status updates and describe the required pieces in detail.