Integrating OpenID and ASP.NET MVC

Hadi Hariri — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:08:11 GMT

OpenID (Microsoft Passport done right), is gaining a lot of popularity and it's common to see it integrated into new and existing web sites. For those not familiar with OpenID, here's a quote from the web site:

For geeks, OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. OpenID takes advantage of already existing internet technology (URI, HTTP, SSL, Diffie-Hellman) and realizes that people are already creating identities for themselves whether it be at their blog, photostream, profile page, etc. With OpenID you can easily transform one of these existing URIs into an account which can be used at sites which support OpenID logins.

I'm currently working on a project with ASP.NET MVC and since it requires a login, I decided to offer the option for users to use OpenID as a means of authentication. The "de-facto" library of choice it seems is .NET OpenID which is available on Google Code. It actually comes with a demo of how to use it with ASP.NET MVC but I have a feeling it was done with the very first CTP of MVC since there are direct accesses to the form object, etc. which isn't really necessary. Having said that, the library is extremely easy to use and I was up and running in about 5 mins. You can download the updated demo below. The code is extremely straight-forward, but if you have trouble understanding anything, just ping me.

OpenId.zip

MSTest "Not Executed" error

Hadi Hariri — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:23:58 GMT

I'm testing out a new IoC container framework (more on that later), and so I decided to setup some tests to see how it works. As a "newbie" to MSTest (MbUnit / xUnit rules!), I wrote my tests, tried to run them and was presented with an error message:

Failed to queue test run 'Hadi Hariri 2008-07-08 10:06:31': Test Run deployment issue: The location of the file or directory 'd:\.....\someAssembly.dll' is not trusted.

Now D is my local drive, so go figure why suddenly an assembly I reference on my local disk is not trusted. Wel lit turns out that Vista, in all it's glory (I have a love-hate relationship with Vista, I love hating it all the time), decided to block this assembly and all other files I extracted from a zip file I downloaded.

So if it happens to you, go to the assembly and unblock it. And of course, this is not something you can do by selecting multiple files at once. No, that would be WAY too dangerous! You need to do it one by one. Alternatively, delete the whole folder, unblock the zip file and then extract it.

Security

Integrating OpenID and ASP.NET MVC

MSTest "Not Executed" error