Question

What is the best way to programmatically read the claim types found in the Web.config?

Answer 1

I might be mistaken, but I don’t think the claim types listed under applicationService/claimTypeRequested in the web.config are actually used by WIF, they’re only used by FedUtil.exe when generating your application’s federation metadata document. Therefore I don’t think WIF exposes them anywhere under FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration like one might expect.

You can always just crack open the web.config and scan for them yourself, like so:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(WebConfigurationManager.OpenWebConfiguration("~").FilePath);
XmlNamespaceManager docNs = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable);
docNs.AddNamespace("fed", doc.DocumentElement.NamespaceURI);
XmlNodeList claimsNodes = doc.SelectNodes(@"/fed:configuration/fed:microsoft.identityModel/fed:service[count(@name)=0 or @name='']/fed:applicationService/fed:claimTypeRequired/fed:claimType", docNs);