To make it short: to switch to SessionMode (cache to server) in ASP.NET, you need to handle an event and set a property. Sounds easy – but you need to set it in the right place.

The most popular blog post about this topic is from Vittorio. He advises to set IsSessionMode in WSFederationAuthenticationModule_SessionSecurityTokenCreated.

Now there were some open questions on forum, like this one. So I decided to try it myself – and indeed it didn’t work for me as well. So I digged a little deeper, and after some trial and error I found the right place (in global.asax):

void WSFederationAuthenticationModule_SecurityTokenValidated(

object sender, SecurityTokenValidatedEventArgs e)

{

    FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule.IsSessionMode
= true; 


}

Not sure if anything has changed since Vittorio’s post – but this worked for me.

While playing around, I also wrote a little diagnostics tool that allows you to look into the session cookie (for educational purposes). Will post that soon.

HTH