Announcing RTM of Katana 3

Vittorio Bertocci - MSFT

Dear all,

Today I have the honor and privilege of announcing the general availability of Katana 3!

This is an important update to Microsoft’s OWIN implementation, which offers you powerful new functionality. In a nutshell:

• Katana 3 takes full advantage of the .NET 4.5 async-await model, affording significant performance improvements in respect to former releases. Note: if you require .NET 4.0 support, you can still use earlier Katana versions.
• Katana 3 introduces a new set of middlewares meant to support enterprise grade authentication and claims based identity via standard protocols, making integration with Azure Active Directory and ADFS straightforward.
  The new middleware follows a proven extensibility model, which grants you the ability to customize every stage of the authentication pipeline while maintaining an extremely simple programming model for the default cases. Existing components (such as the cookies middleware)have been updated accordingly. At this time, Katana 3 supports the following protocols:
• WS-Federation
• OpenId Connect (id_token and id_token+code, via form_post)
• OAuth2 bearer token authentication for Web API
• This release includes fixes for issues related to Twitter and Google API changes. If you have an app using Google authentication and you are updating to Katana 3, please make sure you read this post!

You can find the new packages in the stable feed of NuGet.org. For a complete list please see this page.
The preview stage is finally over: if you were holding back from using those packages given their prerelease status, you can now deploy in production with confidence.
You can find the samples at the usual location https://aspnet.codeplex.com/. For samples demonstrating use of Katana 3 for Azure AD and ADFS integration please refer to https://github.com/AzureADSamples/.

We wanted to thank our fantastic community for all the feedback you gave us during development: this release would not have been possible without your help. Happy coding!

Vittorio Bertocci - MSFT

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