Checkout https://auth0.com/ - the company is run by the guys who build the foundation of the identity stuff in MS. I’m a huge fan of this recently, given the ease of moving between multiple identity providers, you can set a role into the users metadata – depending on your usage you may not even get to a paying level.
I’ve recently used this in react, go, .net and java – it was stupidly easy. This kind of thing is commodity, like email.. you don’t still host your own email server do you? - I shouldn’t forget who I’m talking to.. :) From: <ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> on behalf of Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com> Reply-To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Date: Thursday, 13 October 2016 at 1:51 pm To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Subject: Re: Active Directory B2C I'd like to pose another naïve question about options for moving our ancient text file based authentication system to something more modern and general purpose. Could we just use Azure Active Directory as a credentials and roles "database"? I know that AD wasn't invented just for that purpose, but could I hijack it and use it as a centralised database? I see there are lots of language binding libraries available<https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-authentication-libraries/>, including .NET flavours and Xamarin, so hopefully the code learning curve is quite low. I'm not sure what the cost is like yet, I'm still poking around web search results. Greg K On 11 October 2016 at 16:34, Michael Ridland <rid...@gmail.com<mailto:rid...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi Greg In regards to a Xamarin app, I've not used B2C but I've used Mobile Services which promises the Facebook authentication. It's important to note that the social authentications is only in a webview which means a user needs to enter their username and password. It's not the app integration that you see in majority of apps that have social auth, generally that's a abysmal user experience. It's possible to have the Native app integration it just needs to be implemented using the Native SDK with your app and integrated with Azure. Thanks Michael Ridland | Technical Director | Xamarin MVP XAM Consulting - Mobile Technology Specialists www.xam-consulting.com<http://www.xam-consulting.com/> Blog: www.michaelridland.com<http://www.michaelridland.com> On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Greg Keogh <gfke...@gmail.com<mailto:gfke...@gmail.com>> wrote: Folks, is anyone familiar with Azure Active Directory B2C? I ask because it looks like it might be useful for us, but I'm not sure because the info HERE<https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-b2c/> is more marketing than technical. Here's why I'm asking... At the far backend of one of our REST services is an authentication system that is at least 20 years old and holds the login names, roles and permissions in text files, seriously! The files are vaguely like the INI format. About a year ago my task was to put this information into a SQL Server database, which I did as an experiment, and it went quite well as the data could be nicely normalised. I revisited this issue this week and I think the SQL DB migration idea is already clumsy and outdated. We'd have to host the DB in a VM or in Azure which can get expensive (ref my posts months ago). So I went looking for a more modern idea and stumbled across Azure B2C. It claims to hold all of your authentication credentials and integrate with popular providers like Facebook, Live.com, etc. In theory it would be fabulous if users of our new mobile apps could have a unified sign-in that accepts either our custom credentials or their existing well-known ones. I cannot yet picture the technical difficulty of this, or exactly what's possible or not, but it sounds hopeful. Any ideas anyone? Or are there other choices for a unified sign-in system? Greg K [mage removed by sender.]ᐧ
