Unify Windows Forms and ASP.NET Providers for Credentials Management

摘要

Windows~® Forms intranet applications often resort to storing user credentials in a database even when deployed in a homogenous Windows environment. This stems from the limitations of using Windows accounts. For ASP.NET applications, the Microsoft" .NET Framework 2.0 provides out-of-the-box custom credentials management. You can easily authenticate users and authorize them, without ever having to use Windows accounts. This saves developers valuable time and effort, not to mention providing a high-quality, secure solution. This article presents a set of interacting helper classes that enable a Windows Forms application to use the ASP.NET credentials management infrastructure, with the same ease as if it were an ASP.NET application. Doing so provides the productivity benefits of ASP.NET as well as a unified credentials store, regardless of the application user interface that is being employed. I'll also present some .NET programming techniques and various other design and programming best practices.