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For the past 3 days, I’ve been engrossed in finishing an IE8 accelerator for my pet project codenamed as Arc Reactor. The IE8 Accelerator is simply known as Arc Accelerator. None of these names are final yet, as my team mates and I are still deliberating what will be the actual name of this project.
Anyway the Arc Accelerator is meant to allow users to select a chunk of text in IE8, and save it as a tag. The saved tag can be populated into a “tag cloud” (again no actual name decided yet) maintained by the Arc Reactor client, which is developed as a WPF application.
In order to save the tag, a “session” of some sort needs to be created. It needs to be persistently stored (at least until after the saved tag had been retrieved by the Arc Reactor client). In order to have something like this, I need to identify the user, and to identify a user, that requires some sort of authentication. I’ve pondered over implementing my own authentication function by means of using the ASP.NET membership provider. However, that’s too inflexible as it means yet another set of credentials to be maintained by the user. I thought about using Windows Live ID, but I had no clue how to develop such an authentication function. The fear of the unknown can be rather counter-productive sometimes. I went to check out how to create identity-aware applications, downloaded the WebAuth sample which was made available in the Windows Live ID Web SDK (C# code available, woo hoo!), and it was such a simple thing to do.
Before I could use Windows Live ID authentication, I need to create a new project on the Azure Services Developer Portal. To gain access to this, you just have add the Azure Services Invitation in your Connections Dashboard. Yes it is an invitation-only program, hence you might have to wait a bit before access is granted to you. While you’re at it, also add other Connection programs such as Live Framework CTP Developer Connection, Live Mesh Beta, SQL Server Data Services, and Windows Live Dev Connect. Here’s a sneak peak of all the Connection programs I have under my dashboard:
On the Azure Serviced Developer Portal, click to create a new project. The service component to choose is “Live Services: Existing APIs” as shown below. As you could see, I don’t have access to the other bits, which is a bummer. But anyway, let’s take one step at a time. In due time, I will be able to develop and provision my Azure and Mesh application. I can’t wait.
Enter your project details in the following web page:
The 2 most important fields are Domain and Return URL. Return URL is especially important because this is the URL of your web page handler that will process all the goodies that are returned after Windows Live had authenticated your user. The one and only goodie that I’m keen to get is the user ID so that I can associate the saved tag to an Windows Live ID. After creating your project, you will get 2 very important fields which are the AppID and the SecretKey. You will use these properties in your Windows Live ID login control at a later stage.
Pretty soon I’ll either post my web application here on my blog, or include it in the Arc Reactor project on Codeplex. Stay tuned. In my following posts, I will expound on other things which I have developed such as:
- REST and POX service: To return all the saved tags by Windows Live ID
- WCF service that is based on the List-based Publish-Subscribe pattern
- Using LINQ to SQL class to write the SavedTag into DB
- Clients to test the REST service, WCF service, and ultimately the Arc Reactor client implementation.
