tags

.NET

Using the OAuth 2.0 device flow to authenticate users in desktop apps

Over the last few years, OpenID Connect has become one of the most common ways to authenticate users in a web application. But if you want to use it in a desktop application, it can be a little awkward… Authorization code flow OpenID Connect is an authentication layer built on top of OAuth 2.0, which means that you have to use one of the OAuth 2.0 authorization flows. A few years ago, there were basically two possible flows that you could use in a desktop client application to authenticate a user:

Better timeout handling with HttpClient

The problem If you often use HttpClient to call REST APIs or to transfer files, you may have been annoyed by the way this class handles request timeout. There are two major issues with timeout handling in HttpClient: The timeout is defined at the HttpClient level and applies to all requests made with this HttpClient; it would be more convenient to be able to specify a timeout individually for each request.

Common MSBuild properties and items with Directory.Build.props

To be honest, I never really liked MSBuild until recently. The project files generated by Visual Studio were a mess, most of their content was redundant, you had to unload the projects to edit them, it was poorly documented… But with the advent of .NET Core and the new “SDK-style” projects, it’s become much, much better. MSBuild 15 introduced a pretty cool feature: implicit imports (I don’t know if it’s the official name, but I’ll use it anyway).

Fun with the HttpClient pipeline

A few years ago, Microsoft introduced the HttpClient class as a modern alternative to HttpWebRequest to make web requests from .NET apps. Not only is this new API much easier to use, cleaner, and asynchronous by design, it’s also easily extensible. You might have noticed that HttpClient has a constructor that accepts a HttpMessageHandler. What is this handler? It’s an object that accepts a request (HttpRequestMessage) and returns a response (HttpResponseMessage); how it does that is entirely dependent on the implementation.