Microsoft Identity Web basics
Microsoft Identity Web provides the glue between the ASP.NET Core middleware and MSAL .NET to bring a clearer, more robust developer experience, which also leverages the power of the Microsoft identity platform (formerly Azure AD v2.0 endpoint), and leverages OpenId Connect middleware, which means developers can develop applications which allow several identity providers, including integration with Azure AD B2C.
Microsoft Identity Web leverages Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL), which will fetch the tokens and provides token cache extensibility.
Today, with ASP.NET Core 3.1, without Microsoft Identity Web, when running:
dotnet new --auth
and creating a web app from an ASP.NET core template, the application is targeting the Azure AD v1.0 endpoint, which means sign-in with a work or school account is the only option for customers. There is also no issuer validation happening in multi-tenant applications. The web apps and web APIs that are created do not call downstream web APIs, if a developer wanted to call a downstream web API, they would need to leverage MSAL on their own.
Microsoft.Identity.Web project templates bring many features that were not available in ASP.NET Core 3.1 project templates
Here are the available project templates:
