BadGuy's blog

[Updated: Added link to the dll in the post]
Oh dear, I never thought this would happen to me but; once again I find myself using Windows XP at a customer site. A huge dissapointment as some organizations are just too big to move on quickly. Luckily there’s a big x year program set up to verify that all apps will work on Windows 7 and there’s a great pilot going on that you as an external employee cannot enter. Just another day in the live of a consultant.

Now using XP is something that will take some getting used to again but one of the things that has been bothering me alot when I started this gig is that most of my CRM 2011 related tools weren’t working. Even worse: the CRM 2011 CRM developer toolkit which is included in the CRM 2011 SDK (from v 5.0.5) wouldn’t work either. This is the error I got:

“Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35′ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.IdentityModel, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35′ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.”

The problem here is Windows Identity Foundation which is described as: “WIF is a framework for building identity-aware applications. The framework [...] presents developers with APIs for building security token services and claims-aware applications.” Which at the end of the day just isn’t available for Windows XP. For me it was a huge let down that I wasn’t able to use some CRM 2011 tools that would make me more productive even though I didn’t even really need WIF to connect to them.

But don’t fear as there is a solution that actually does work for me:

Step 1

Download and install your favorite tools (be it the toolkit, the js webresource manager or the site map editor)

Step 2

Download the Windows Identity Model dll from my website

Step 3

Install the dll to the gac like so (use the Visual Studio command prompt if you like):

gacutil -I “C:<path here>Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll”

Step 4

Profit (don’t forget to install the latest Silverlight Developer runtime before using the CRM 2011 developer toolkit )

So far I haven’t had any issues using this little trick so I hope it will help someone out. I doubt claims based authentication will work like this, but I think that generally speaking this won’t work under Windows XP. Connecting to online should work and on-premise definitely works.

- Alex

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