services	platforms	author	level	client	service	endpoint
active-directory	dotnet	jmprieur	300	.NET Desktop (Console)	ASP.NET MVC Web API	AAD V1

Authenticating to Azure AD non-interactively using a username & password or Windows Integrated Authentication

About this sample

Scenario

This sample demonstrates a .Net console application calling a web API that is secured using Azure AD. the application does not require user interaction through a Web browser:

1. The .Net application uses the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to obtain a JWT access token through the OAuth 2.0 protocol.
2. The access token is sent to the web API to authenticate the user.

This sample shows you how to use ADAL to authenticate users via raw credentials (username and password, or Windows-integrated authentication) via a text-only interface. Information is available in the ADAL.NET conceptual documentation in Acquiring tokens with username and password and AcquireTokenSilentAsync using Integrated authentication on Windows (Kerberos)

More information about protocols

For more information about how the protocols work in this scenario and other scenarios, see Authentication Scenarios for Azure AD.

Looking for previous versions of this code sample? Check out the tags on the releases GitHub page.

How To Run This Sample

[!Note] If you want to run this sample on Azure Government, navigate to the "Azure Government Deviations" section at the bottom of this page.

To run this sample, you'll need:

• Visual Studio 2017
• An Internet connection
• An Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant. For more information on how to get an Azure AD tenant, see How to get an Azure AD tenant
• A user account in your Azure AD tenant. This sample will not work with a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live account). Therefore, if you signed in to the Azure portal with a Microsoft account and have never created a user account in your directory before, you need to do that now.

Step 1: Clone or download this repository

From your shell or command line:

git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/active-directory-dotnet-native-headless.git

Given that the name of the sample is pretty long, and so are the name of the referenced NuGet pacakges, you might want to clone it in a folder close to the root of your hard drive, to avoid file size limitations on Windows.

Step 2: Register the sample with your Azure Active Directory tenant and configure the code accordingly

There are two projects in this sample. Each needs to be separately registered in your Azure AD tenant. To register these projects, you can:

• either follow the steps in the paragraphs below (Step 2 and Step 3)
• or use PowerShell scripts that:
  • automatically create for you the Azure AD applications and related objects (passwords, permissions, dependencies)
  • modify the Visual Studio projects' configuration files.

If you want to use this automation, read the instructions in App Creation Scripts

First step: choose the Azure AD tenant where you want to create your applications

As a first step you'll need to:

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. On the top bar, click on your account, and then on Switch Directory.
3. Once the Directory + subscription pane opens, choose the Active Directory tenant where you wish to register your application, from the Favorites or All Directories list.
4. Click on All services in the left-hand nav, and choose Azure Active Directory.

In the next steps, you might need the tenant name (or directory name) or the tenant ID (or directory ID). These are presented in the Properties of the Azure Active Directory window respectively as Name and Directory ID

Register the service app (TodoListService-Headless)

1. In the Azure Active Directory pane, click on App registrations and choose New application registration.
2. Enter a friendly name for the application, for example 'TodoListService-Headless' and select 'Web app / API' as the Application Type.
3. For the sign-on URL, enter the base URL for the sample. By default, this sample uses https://localhost:44321.
4. Click Create to create the application.
5. In the succeeding page, Find the Application ID value and record it for later. You'll need it to configure the Visual Studio configuration file for this project.
6. Then click on Settings, and choose Properties.
7. For the App ID URI, replace the guid in the generated URI 'https://<your_tenant_name>/<guid>', with the name of your service, for example, 'https://<your_tenant_name>/TodoListService-Headless' (replacing <your_tenant_name> with the name of your Azure AD tenant)

Register the client app (TodoListClient-Headless)

1. In the Azure Active Directory pane, click on App registrations and choose New application registration.
2. Enter a friendly name for the application, for example 'TodoListClient-Headless' and select 'Native' as the Application Type.
3. For the Redirect URI, enter https://<your_tenant_name>/TodoListClient-Headless, replacing <your_tenant_name> with the name of your Azure AD tenant.
4. Click Create to create the application.
5. In the succeeding page, Find the Application ID value and record it for later. You'll need it to configure the Visual Studio configuration file for this project.
6. Then click on Settings, and choose Properties.
7. Configure Permissions for your application. To that extent, in the Settings menu, choose the 'Required permissions' section and then, click on Add, then Select an API, and type TodoListService-Headless in the textbox. Then, click on Select Permissions and select Access 'TodoListService-Headless'.

Step 3: Configure the sample to use your Azure AD tenant

In the steps below, "ClientID" is the same as "Application ID" or "AppId".

Open the solution in Visual Studio to configure the projects

Configure the service project

1. Open the TodoListService\Web.Config file
2. Find the app key ida:Tenant and replace the existing value with your Azure AD tenant name.
3. Find the app key ida:Audience and replace the existing value with the App ID URI you registered earlier for the TodoListService-Headless app. For instance use https://<your_tenant_name>/TodoListService-Headless, where <your_tenant_name> is the name of your Azure AD tenant.

Configure the client project

1. Open the TodoListClient\App.Config file
2. Find the app key ida:Tenant and replace the existing value with your Azure AD tenant name.
3. Find the app key ida:ClientId and replace the existing value with the application ID (clientId) of the TodoListClient-Headless application copied from the Azure portal.
4. Find the app key todo:TodoListResourceId and replace the existing value with the App ID URI you registered earlier for the TodoListService-Headless app. For instance use https://<your_tenant_name>/TodoListService-Headless, where <your_tenant_name> is the name of your Azure AD tenant.
5. Find the app key todo:TodoListBaseAddress and replace the existing value with the base address of the TodoListService-Headless project (by default https://localhost:44321).

Step 4: Run the sample

Clean the solution, rebuild the solution, and run it. You might want to go into the solution properties and set both projects as startup projects, with the service project starting first.

Type the command add. You will be prompted for your username and password. Enter them, then enter the description a new todo. That done, type the command list. You will see that the command executes without prompting you again. You can clear the token cache by typing clear, and leave the client by typing exit. Notice that if you stop the application without clearing the cache, the next time you run the application you won't be prompted to sign in again - that is the sample implements a persistent cache for ADAL, and remembers the tokens from the previous run.

How to deploy this sample to Azure

This project has one WebApp / Web API projects. To deploy them to Azure Web Sites, you'll need, for each one, to:

• create an Azure Web Site
• publish the Web App / Web APIs to the web site, and
• update its client(s) to call the web site instead of IIS Express.

Create and Publish the TodoListService-Headless to an Azure Web Site

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. Click Create a resource in the top left-hand corner, select Web + Mobile --> Web App, select the hosting plan and region, and give your web site a name, for example, TodoListService-Headless-contoso.azurewebsites.net. Click Create Web Site.
3. Once the web site is created, click on it to manage it. For this set of steps, download the publish profile by clicking Get publish profile and save it. Other deployment mechanisms, such as from source control, can also be used.
4. Switch to Visual Studio and go to the TodoListService project. Right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Publish. Click Import Profile on the bottom bar, and import the publish profile that you downloaded earlier.
5. Click on Settings and in the Connection tab, update the Destination URL so that it is https, for example https://TodoListService-Headless-contoso.azurewebsites.net. Click Next.
6. On the Settings tab, make sure Enable Organizational Authentication is NOT selected. Click Save. Click on Publish on the main screen.
7. Visual Studio will publish the project and automatically open a browser to the URL of the project. If you see the default web page of the project, the publication was successful.

Update the Active Directory tenant application registration for TodoListService-Headless

1. Navigate to the Azure portal.
2. On the top bar, click on your account and under the Directory list, choose the Active Directory tenant containing the TodoListService-Headless application.
3. On the applications tab, select the TodoListService-Headless application.
4. From the Settings -> Properties and Settings -> Reply URLs menus, update the Sign-On URL, and Reply URL fields to the address of your service, for example https://TodoListService-Headless-contoso.azurewebsites.net. Save the configuration.

Update the TodoListClient-Headless to call the TodoListService-Headless Running in Azure Web Sites

1. In Visual Studio, go to the TodoListClient-Headless project.
2. Open TodoListClient\App.Config. Only one change is needed - update the todo:TodoListBaseAddress key value to be the address of the website you published, for example, https://TodoListService-Headless-contoso.azurewebsites.net.
3. Run the client! If you are trying multiple different client types (for example, .Net, Windows Store, Android, iOS) you can have them all call this one published web API.

NOTE: Remember, the To Do list is stored in memory in this TodoListService sample. Azure Web Sites will spin down your web site if it is inactive, and your To Do list will get emptied. Also, if you increase the instance count of the web site, requests will be distributed among the instances. To Do will, therefore, not be the same on each instance.

About The Code

This sample shows how to use the OpenID Connect ASP.Net OWIN middleware to secure calls to an Asp.net Web API to users of a single Azure Active Directory tenant. The middleware is initialized in the Startup.Auth.cs file, by passing it the URL of the Azure AD tenant (token issuer) and the AppId URI, which is the identifier by which the Web API is known to Windows Azure AD. The middleware then takes care of:

• Downloading the Azure AD metadata, finding the signing keys, and finding the issuer name for the tenant.
• Processing OpenID Connect sign-in responses by validating the signature and issuer in an incoming JWT, extracting the user's claims, and putting them on ClaimsPrincipal.Current.
• Any tokens carrying a different Audience are meant for another resource and will be rejected.

Acquiring a token with username password

To add an element to the todo list, first the program will try to acquire a token silently from the cache Program.cs, line 218, if this acquisition fails, the program asks for a user name password and creates an instance of UserCredential. This is done in TextualPrompt(). Then it calls the AcquireTokenAsync override with the UserCredential in Program.cs, line 164.

Since this sample works on .NET framework, it also features the custom serialization of the token cache, which happens in FileCache.cs

Acquiring a token with Windows Integrated security

If your PC is domain joined or AAD joined, you can also use the Windows-integrated security. For this, instead of calling TextualPrompt(), you need to uncomment the line creating an instance of UserCredential without parameters: See Program.cs

UserCredential uc = new UserCredential();

You can trigger the middleware to send an OpenID Connect sign-in request by decorating a class or method with the [Authorize] attribute

Troubleshooting

If you get the following error: Inner Exception : AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID *your app ID* named 'TodoListClient'. Send an interactive authorization request for this user and resource, then check that you have done bullet point 9 of Register the TodoListClient app

How To Recreate This Sample

Code for the service

1. In Visual Studio 2017, create a new Visual C# ASP.NET Web Application (.NET Framework). Choose Web Api in the next screen. Leave the project's chosen authentication mode as the default, that is, No Authentication.
2. Set SSL Enabled to be True. Note the SSL URL.
3. Add the following ASP.Net OWIN middleware NuGets: Microsoft.Owin.Security.ActiveDirectory and Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb.
4. Add a class named TodoItem in the Models folder. Add the properties Title and Owner in this class.
5. Add a new Web Api 2 Controller - Empty named TodoListController in the service.
6. The TodoListController will have an in-memory list of ToDo items and methods to read and write from that list. Refer to the provided TodoListController code for more details.
7. In the App_Start folder, create a class Startup.Auth.cs.You will need to remove .App_Start from the namespace name. Replace the code for the Startup class with the code from the same file of the sample app. Be sure to take the whole class definition! The definition changes from public class Startup to public partial class Startup
8. In Startup.Auth.cs resolve missing references by adding using statements as suggested by Visual Studio intellisense.
9. Right-click on the project, select Add, select "Class", and in the search box enter "OWIN". "OWIN Startup class" will appear as a selection; select it, and name the class Startup.cs.
10. In Startup.cs, replace the code for the Startup class with the code from the same file of the sample app. Again, note the definition changes from public class Startup to public partial class Startup.
11. If you want the user to be required to sign in before they can see any page of the api, then in the HomeController, decorate the HomeController class with the [Authorize] attribute. If you leave this out, the user will be able to see the home page of the app without having to sign in first, and can click the sign-in link on that page to get signed in.
12. In the web.config file, in <appSettings>, create keys for ida:Tenant, and ida:Audience and set the values accordingly.
13. Almost done! Follow the steps in "Running This Sample" to register the application in your AAD tenant.

Code for the console client

1. In Visual Studio 2017, create a new Visual C# Console App (>NET Framework).
2. Add the NuGet packages: Microsoft.Owin.Security.ActiveDirectory, Newtonsoft.Json and System.Net.Http.
3. Add a reference for the System.Security assembly in the project.
4. In Program.cs, replace the code for the Program class with the code from the same file of the sample app. Resolve missing references by adding using statements as suggested by Visual Studio intellisense.
5. Add a new class called FileCache.cs in the project. It is a simple persistent cache implementation for a desktop application. It uses DPAPI for storing tokens in a local file. Replace the code for the FileCache class with the code from the same file of the sample app. Be sure to take the whole class definition!
6. In the FileCache.cs class, resolve missing references by adding using statements as suggested by Visual Studio intellisense.
7. In app.config, in <appSettings>, create keys for ida:Tenant, ida:ClientId, ida:AADInstance, todo:TodoListResourceId and todo:TodoListBaseAddress and set the values accordingly. For the global Azure AD, the value of ida:AADInstance is https://login.microsoftonline.com/{0}.

Azure Government Deviations

In order to run this sample on Azure Government you can follow through the steps above with a few variations:

• Step 2:
  • You must register this sample for your AAD Tenant in Azure Government by following Step 2 above in the Azure Government portal.
• Step 3:
  • Before configuring the sample, you must make sure your Visual Studio is connected to Azure Government.
  • Navigate to the Web.config file. Replace the ida:AADInstance property in the Azure AD section with https://login.microsoftonline.us/.

Once those changes have been accounted for, you should be able to run this sample on Azure Government.

Community Help and Support

Use Stack Overflow to get support from the community. Ask your questions on Stack Overflow first and browse existing issues to see if someone has asked your question before. Make sure that your questions or comments are tagged with [adal dotnet].

If you find a bug in the sample, please raise the issue on GitHub Issues.

To provide a recommendation, visit the following User Voice page.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to this sample, see CONTRIBUTING.MD.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information, see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

More information

For more information, see ADAL.NET's conceptual documentation:

• Recommanded pattern to acquire a token
• Acquiring tokens with username and password
• AcquireTokenSilentAsync using Integrated authentication on Windows (Kerberos)
• Customizing Token cache serialization

For more information about how OAuth 2.0 protocols work in this scenario and other scenarios, see Authentication Scenarios for Azure AD.