Azure Mobile Services and ASP Identity - Exception when using UserManager

Question

I've reviewed
this post in the AMS forum and it doesn't really answer the question. I already know how to integrate authentication, but Identity implements a lot of boilerplate user management code that I don't want to have to reproduce.  My question is: Is it possible
to use Asp Identity framework with Azure Mobile Services? Since AMS Back End has Microsoft ASP.NET Identity Core/Owin as dependencies, I would think that the answer is yes, that they are compatible?
I have been progressing as if it were possible, but yet, now when I go to try to use the Identity UserManager, I am getting the exception stated in
this asp.net identity bug. Are there references in Azure Mobile Services Back End to previous versions of Microsoft.AspNet.Identity that would result in mismatched assembly versions?
I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling Asp.Net Identity, even to the pre-release of 2.2.0, but I am still getting the exception that it couldn't load the CultureAwaiter. I have asked in that post if the bug has been fixed, but from the scant evidence of
the posts and lack of responses, I would think that the bug has been fixed.
ibGib

Answer 1

The bug referenced in the original post shows that the required version is 2.1. I found that when I published to Azure, even though I had the correct (2.1) versions of the NuGet packages installed, the loaded dlls were not the correct versions. I do not
know if this is an Azure problem or an Azure Mobile Services problem.
I came to this conclusion by looking at the loaded Identity dlls in a new, up-to-date mvc app, and then looking at the same loaded dlls while debugging in Azure. The Azure dlls are older versions than the up-to-date MVC app versions. I figure that somewhere
along the lines, Azure Mobile Services is loading the incorrect version of the Identity dlls, even though I have the correct versions installed via NuGet. Maybe there is another explanation.
But regardless, I should be able to use the up-to-date versions of Identity in order to address bugs in the Identity framework. It would be nice if an AMS person would clarify about the dll versioning. I did come across
this SO comment by someone who seems to be an AMS guru, but it doesn't seem to make sense. It does, however, seem to corroborate my and BinLaw's observed behavior of the backend dlls.
ibGib