Authorization in Silverlight
Author: Kevin Dockx
Price: $0.99 
Format: PDF, Word, EPUB, MOBI. Source code included with the downloadable package.
Number of pages: 23
Release date: October 2011 | Latest update (chapter 3 added): Oct 27, 2011
This ebook collects the three parts of SilverlightShow article series Authorization in Silverlight, together with source code.
From the author: As we know, Silverlight is very capable platform for building Line of Business applications today, both in and out of the browser. It’s come to the point that – at least in my experience – a lot of desktop applications are now built with Silverlight instead of WinForms, skipping over WPF completely.
With that in mind, it’s pretty weird that there’s an essential part that seems to be missing: authentication & authorization. When you look at the Silverlight Core CLR, there’s not much there concerning this – although it’s a no-brainer for business and enterprise applications: you need to make sure certain parts of your application are only available to users that are authenticated or have a specific role. Sure, you can use the hosting web page & ASP .NET authentication to ensure only authenticated persons can reach your Silverlight application, but there’s no out of the box way to enable or block a user from navigating to a specific view in your application.
Luckily, it only requires a little bit of coding and all in all: it’s quite easy to enable authenticated & authorized navigation in your Silverlight applications, mainly thanks to the introduction of a new class in Silverlight 4: the custom content loader.
In this ebook, we’ll look into enabling scenarios to enable/disable certain parts of your application for authenticated users, and to automatically ask the user for his credentials if he’s trying to access a part of the application that requires him to be authenticated or to have a specific role.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Authorized navigation
Introduction
Introducing: the Custom Content Loader
The required parts
Uri right mappings: who can access which resource?
The Authentication context
Our own custom content loader
Bringing it all together…
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Manipulating the UI
Introduction
The not-so-cool yet oh-well-it-works way
Introducing a better approach: attachable properties.
The Authorization Service
Helper method: setting the target properties.
Using this in XAML
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Securing your service calls
Introduction
WCF RIA Services
WCF - checking the authenticated user in each operation
WCF Service - automation through attributes
Conclusion
About the author:
Kevin Dockx lives in Belgium and works at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies, where he is a technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications, mainly Silverlight, and a solution manager for Rich Applications (Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 Series, WPF, Surface). His main focus lies on all things Silverlight, but he still keeps an eye on the new developments concerning other products from the Microsoft .NET (Web) Stack. As a Silverlight enthusiast, he's a regular speaker on various national and international events, like Microsoft DevDays in The Netherlands, Microsoft Techdays in Portugal and Belgium, or on BESUG events (the Belgian Silverlight User Group). Next to that, he also authored a best-selling Silverlight book, Packt Publishing's Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook, together with Gill Cleeren. His blog, which contains various tidbits on Silverlight, .NET, and the occasional rambling, can be found at http://blog.kevindockx.com/, and of course he can also be found on Twitter @KevinDockx