WIF: LocalSTS not authenticating - asp.net-mvc-4

Question

I'm totally new to WIF and to start playing with it a bit I tried the simplest "f5 experience" with an MVC4 application; according to the tutorials I found, which sadly for the most part refer to releases before .net 4.5, I should just create an MVC app, configure it with the identity and access tool and hit f5 to get up and running with local STS. Yet, I'm probably missing something obvious because when I try to access a restricted page I always end bumped back to the homepage.
Here is what I did, you can easily repro the issue with these steps (VS2012 in Win8 with WIF SDK; ensure to launch VS with admin rights):
create a new ASP.NET MVC4 Internet application. Set its port to 7777 (just picking the port number used in most code samples for the sake of commodity).
update all the NuGet packages (this is optional).
right click the solution, choose identity and access and set the IP=local STS, then click OK. Then reopen the identity and access popup, and choose generate a controller, then click OK.
add an [Authorize] attribute to the About action of the Home controller.
hit F5 and click the About link. As expected, the login view appears, prompting me to login: the only option is of course localSTS. When I click it, I am returned to the homepage and no authentication occurs. I can repeat the process, but nothing changes, so I can never access the secured About page.
The link underlying the localSTS anchor is:
http://localhost:14743/wsFederationSTS/Issue?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=http%3a%2f%2flocalhost%3a7777%2f&wctx=rm%3d0%26id%3d664ff3c2-95b1-40b3-b538-a8357233ea7e%26ru%3dhttp%253a%252f%252flocalhost%253a7777%252f&wct=2013-03-10T13%3a39%3a32Z
AFAIK, its parameters look OK.
If I examine the network traffic, I cannot see any relevant item (if I understand well, I would expect a response setting some cookies for the current session, representing the IClaimsPrincipal).
(BTW, by looking at the web.config, I can see that in modules WSFederationAuthenticationModule is referenced from System.Identity.Services, which is NOT included in the solution after configuring Identity and access; I suppose this is a bug in the tool. Anyway I added a reference to it, but nothing changed.)
Update
Thank you for the reply! If I examine the traffic, here are the relevant GET/POSTs. I get no cookie. I tried recreating the whole test solution, even skipping step #2 above to keep it minimal, but nothing changed.
As for your suggestion #2, I tried to add in global asax:
FederatedAuthentication.WSFederationAuthenticationModule.SecurityTokenValidated
+= (sender, e) => FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule.IsReferenceMode = true;
but the SessionAuthenticationModule is null at the time this code executes and thus a corresponding exception is thrown. I cannot find up-to-date code samples or articles about this, yet WIF seems a very promising tech; I'd like it to be easy for security newbies like me; my main purpose is applying it to a site providing both MVC controllers and WebApi controllers, to a wide range of consumers (JS code, mobile apps, WinRT apps, the site pages themselves...). Any suggestion?
(1) a GET which gets 307, temporary redirect
GET /wsFederationSTS/Issue?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=http%3a%2f%2flocalhost%3a7777%2f&wctx=rm%3d0%26id%3d664ff3c2-95b1-40b3-b538-a8357233ea7e%26ru%3dhttp%253a%252f%252flocalhost%253a7777%252f&wct=2013-03-10T13%3a39%3a32Z HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:14743
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22
Referer: http://localhost:7777/HrdAuthentication/Login?ReturnUrl=%2fHome%2fAbout
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie:
(2) GET with signin request:
GET /wsFederationSTS/Issue/?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=http%3a%2f%2flocalhost%3a7777%2f&wctx=rm%3d0%26id%3d664ff3c2-95b1-40b3-b538-a8357233ea7e%26ru%3dhttp%253a%252f%252flocalhost%253a7777%252f&wct=2013-03-10T13%3a39%3a32Z HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:14743
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22
Referer: http://localhost:7777/HrdAuthentication/Login?ReturnUrl=%2fHome%2fAbout
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie:
(3) a POST to the homepage: the respone is of course the homepage content; no cookies set.
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:7777
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 7063
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Origin: http://localhost:14743
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Referer: http://localhost:14743/wsFederationSTS/Issue/?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=http%3a%2f%2flocalhost%3a7777%2f&wctx=rm%3d0%26id%3d664ff3c2-95b1-40b3-b538-a8357233ea7e%26ru%3dhttp%253a%252f%252flocalhost%253a7777%252f&wct=2013-03-10T13%3a39%3a32Z
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie:
A working variation
I found a way for letting it work, maybe this can be useful to someone else: if you follow the above procedure without changing from the local IIS server to the VS development server, it seems it's working and I'm still redirected to the Home page (I wonder why:), but as an authenticated user; at this point, I can click the About link again to effectively enter the page.

Answer 1

I reproduce your steps and everything worked. Chrome debugger show that you must have two steps:
GET http://localhost:12263/wsFederationSTS/Issue/?wa=wsignin1.0&wtrealm=http%3a%2f%2flocalhost%3a54306%2f&wctx=rm%3d0%26id%3dc6e46b99-417b-49b6-96a0-40efcead898f%26ru%3dhttp%253a%252f%252flocalhost%253a54306%252f&wct=2013-03-10T18%3a14%3a19Z
POST http://localhost:54306/ with wa:wsignin1.0 and wresult:trust:RequestSecurityTokenResponseCollection
Result of POST is Set-Cookie named FedAuth and FedAuth1. Cookie is split because of cookie size limit.
Please check this in debugger.
p.s. Once i saw a same behavior - cookie is not set normally. Problem was in cookie size and solved by switching to ReferenceMode. Don't forget to to register it in Application_Start:
FederatedAuthentication.WSFederationAuthenticationModule.SessionSecurityTokenCreated
+= this.WSFederationAuthenticationModule_SessionSecurityTokenCreated;