Independent Game Thoughts

When I developed the WCF Membership Provider, I envisioned it being used as the basis for authentication across a wide array of products on any number of platforms.  The only requirement that the client application would need to have is that it could speak to web services using SOAP.  Out of the box, the code I presented in my article does not directly achieve that goal.  More work is necessary to make that a reality. 

Specifically, I would implement System.Web.ApplicationServices as the front end of the WCF Membership Provider by adding these services to a web site in the DMZ.  Non-ASP.Net clients and external web sites that did not need to have CreateUser/CreateRole/DeleteUser/... functionality would use these services.  ApplicationServices implements the subset of functionality required to authenticate against an ASP.Net membership store.  The Sql Server membership store that I chose to use is installed into a database in your application's database layer.  There's a command line tool that ships with all versions of the .Net framework.  I used .Net 4.0 for the code in my article.

Click here for a walk through on how to install SqlMembershipProvider's membership store.

Click here for a walk through on setting up System.Web.ApplicationServices.

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I haven't done a programming article in quite a while. The Sql Server Code Generator article continues to get a decent amount of hits so I thought it would be nice to give again and post some more code from one of my current projects.

A bit of background before I get started. The web site I am working on will require access from a variety of clients. The current list includes web browsers on all OSes and dedicated applications on Windows Phone 7 (via Silverlight), iOS 4(iPhone/iPad/iTouch) and Android. What I wanted to provide to these platforms was a unified method of authenticating against the backend services. Did I mention that I need to get this up and running as quickly as possible. My only other real goal was to build it in such a way that piece of it could be factored out for scalability.

Since I am using ASP.Net to create the web site, I immediately looked to the provider model for help. ASP.Net comes with a pretty robust Sql Server based user database. Will it scale to a million users?  I'm not sure but considering that I don't have the first user, I figured it was a good place to start.

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Visual Studio 2010 was released last week and I’ve wanted to get my hands dirty with it for a few months now.  So far, I like what I see.  My first application will be a conversion of the Graffiti CMS latest 1.3 branch to the new .Net framework.  I’m doing a custom version that integrates...

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As I sat there the other night building yet another content management system from the ground up, I thought to myself that there had to be a better alternative. What, I really wanted to do is get the basics out of the way. I needed a CMS that would allow me to setup a web site quickly but still let me...

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I updated my SQL Code Builder application this afternoon to fix a few bugs I ran across while I was building another application using it. Here’s the list of bugs fixed: * Fixed a bug in the Delete stored procedure where the parameters did not have a space between the "and" and the parameter...

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If you’re like me and you don’t read directions or search the web before using an application then you’ve probably messed up your iTunes library once or twice. I recently did this when I tried to use a central iTunes library on a second computer. I selected the checkbox in the Preferences...

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Network admins everywhere cringe today as March Madness invades the workplace. So what does an administrator do? Well, if you have a commercial grade firewall you can block port 5001 access from all LAN computers to stop Slingbox. You can also block ESPN360 access using ports 1765 - 1763. Sling box is...

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I might end up using this to write to my blog instead of actually using the blog authoring tool itself. Between this and the new Microsoft Tags site and my new Twitter account, I’m beginning to branch out into the rest of the web. Next thing you know, I’ll actually get around to finishing...

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I've released code for a tool I've been using in hopes that others might find it useful in their daily work. It's a simple tool to generate stored procedures and C# data access layers for .Net 2.0 and higher applications. The entire article can be found here: SQL Stored Procedure and C# Object...

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Over the past few years I've been using and developing a tool that I wrote to help me generate SQL Server stored procedures and the corresponding C# object code to access the stored procedures. I thought I would release the tool here under GPL so that other might find it useful in their projects...

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