Access ACS Azure from Winforms

Question

I have an Azure webrole that requires ACSv2 authentication that I want to access from a winforms application. Many of my clients use Windows XP so I can not use the WIF (which is not available on Windows XP). What is the best way to get an authentication token for my web request in this case?

Answer 1

For desktop applications you can do the following:

1. Get the list of identity providers from your ACS namespace
2. Display these in a WebBrowser control
3. After the user logs in, get the token from the WebBrowser control and parse it.

This is similar to when you want to use ACS in a Windows Phone application. I suggest you take a look at this blog post: Azure ACS on Windows Phone 7. And here is the sample code which parses the token after the user logs in through the WebBrowser control (on WP7):

private void SignInWebBrowserControl_ScriptNotify(object sender, NotifyEventArgs e) 
{ 
    var acsResponse = ACSResponse.FromJSON(e.Value);

    RequestSecurityTokenResponse rstr = null; 
    Exception exception = null; 
    try 
    { 
        string binaryToken = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(acsResponse.securityToken); 
        string tokenText = RequestSecurityTokenResponseDeserializer.ProcessBinaryToken(binaryToken); 
        DateTime expiration = DateTime.Now + TimeSpan.FromSeconds(acsResponse.expires – acsResponse.created);

        rstr = new RequestSecurityTokenResponse 
                    { 
                        Expiration = expiration, 
                        TokenString = tokenText, 
                        TokenType = acsResponse.tokenType 
                    };