My first blog post about AD authentication proven to be very popular – amount of visits to this post in the last month have beaten the previous all-popular post about HTTPS in MVC and even about configuring Dependency Injection with Identity. So I decided to write a follow-up with clarifications and corrections.
Active Directory
Using OWIN and Active Directory to authenticate users in ASP.Net MVC 5 application
UPD There is a part 2 of this blog-post explaining how to do roles and fixing a minor issue with authentication.
UPD If you are on Windows 10 and get “System.IO.FileNotFoundException: The system cannot find the file specified”, have a look on this page. Thanks to David Engel for this link.
A while back I had to implement a login system that relied on in-house Active Directory. I did spend some time on figuring out how to work this in the nicest possible ways.
One of the approaches I used in the past is to slam Windows Authentication on top of the entire site and be done with it. But this is not very user-friendly – before showing anything, you are slammed with a nasty prompt for username/password. And you need to remember to include your domain name in some cases. I totally did not want that on a new green-field project. So here goes the instructions on how to do a nice authentication against your Windows Users or in-house hosted Active Directory.
For this project I’ll use Visual Studio 2015. But steps for VS2013 will be the same. Can’t say anything nice about any earlier versions of Visual Studio – I don’t use them anymore.