Is a Security Token Service required

Question

We looked at Identity Server and Starter STS seems large to serve a few encrypted claims. So coming to the question

1. Is a STS required or mandatory to Federate with ADFS 2.0

2. We opted for Identity Server since ADFS 2.0 does not support other data stores

3. Is there a option to serve claims through mvc controllers or something using Windows Identity Foundation and SAML 2.0 Protocol

Answer 1

You tagged this with SAML so I presume that's the protocol (rather than WIF).

I assume your application is ASP.NET?

If you want to federate with ADFS, then Yes, you need another flavour of STS.

IdentityServer does not support SAML to applications.

There is a WIF SAML CTP.

If you want a .NET application to speak direct to a STS using SAML, you can use the .NET OpenSSO Fedlet (or the OpenAM one).