Does WIF Require a STS to be a Website in VS, not a Web Application Project? Seeing strange behavior with system.identitymodel

Question

I might be banging my head against the wall for no good reason, so this is more a curiosity, and I will rewrite what I've done so far.

Does WIF require the STS to be a Website in Visual Studio?  The examples I've done in the Identity Training kit all use the STS as a website.  My existing project is a Web Application Project.  But, none of the examples translate to it.  If I create an App_Code directory, I will not get errors using some of the Claims creation classes - but, Intellisense doesn't work and the objects are highlighted in blue.  Furthermore, none of my other classes can see them.

So for an experiment, I moved them to the root of the project - now intellisense works... but I'm getting this error:  The type 'IdentityModel' does not exist in the namespace 'System'. 

I did just add the System.IdentityModel reference.  Is that "magically" included in a website? 

I realize these are a bit rambling questions, but if anyone has some insight, I woudl appreciate it if nothing more than to satisfy my own confusion.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wcf/thread/f7fbcd78-48a0-4877-af47-2f5a1af6cc14

Answer 1

I'm going to answer this myself, and if someone can tell me I'm wrong - please do.

It might be possible to do an STS as a Web Application Project - but I am guessing it's a horrible idea.  The templates and SDK appears to significantly prefer you to use websites.  For example, the "update federation metadata" context menu is only available if you're in a website.  For that feature alone, you should probably use websites.

Phooey.