Hello developers!
I’m happy to announce that Microsoft Authentication Libraries (MSAL) for .NET and JavaScript are now Generally Available! MSAL makes it easy for your application to sign in users and get access tokens to securely call protected APIs – from your own APIs to Microsoft Graph. MSAL enables secure access to data for any Microsoft identity – from personal Microsoft accounts to work or school accounts provided by Azure Active Directory.
What types of applications can you build with MSAL?
With MSAL, developers can build applications for a number scenarios including:
- Web apps calling web APIs
- Web APIs that call downstream web APIs
- Desktop applications that sign in and call APIs
- Windows applications (Win 32 or UWP) – including domain or Azure AD joined machines using Integrated Windows Authentication.
- Linux or MacOS (with .NET Core)
- Daemon applications (Web or console) which call protected APIs as a service to do offline processing independent of any user.
You can choose your platform of choice HERE and start building your application with MSAL today!
Why should you use MSAL?
By using MSAL you get built-in benefits for your application like single sign-on, advanced security, passwordless authentication, and being able to comply with conditional access policies implemented by IT. Thousands of applications are already using MSAL in production. In fact, some of our very own Microsoft built applications like Visual Studio and Azure PowerShell are using MSAL.NET today.
Existing applications that use Azure Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) or directly target the Azure AD v1.0 endpoint will continue to work. You can update to MSAL when you’re ready. Thanks to a shared token cache, you can maintain a portfolio of applications built with ADAL and MSAL and single sign-on (SSO) will continue to work between them.
What’s next for MSAL?
We’ve made significant progress on MSAL iOS, and MSAL Android which are all feature complete. Be sure to give us feedback on the latest public preview builds and stay tuned for announcements regarding GA of these libraries.
We’ve also been working on delivering MSAL Java and MSAL Python based on customer demand! We would love to hear your feedback and look forward to making these public preview soon..
We’re excited to GA MSAL .NET and JavaScript and would love to hear about all the cool things you are building!
– Saeed Akhter / Twitter: @saeedakhter / Principal PM Lead for MSAL
