In the last post we saw how to add custom authentication inside your Data Service using the ProcessingRequest event. Unfortunately that approach means authentication is not integrated or shared with the rest of your website. Which means for all but the simplest scenarios a better approach is needed: HttpModules. HttpModules can do all sort of thing...

If you secure an OData Service using Windows authentication – see Part 2 to learn how – everything works as expected out of the box. What however if you need a different authentication scheme? Well the answer as always depends upon your scenario. Broadly speaking what you need to do depends upon how your Data Service is hosted. You ...

Today we released an OData Mailing List.  This is the list to use if you have OData questions, comments on OData or want to discuss how OData should evolve over time.  To sign up to the list go here and follow the instructions provided.  The list is fully open so anyone can subscribe and participate.  Be sure to read the terms...

TechEd North America 2010 is fast approaching (it starts Monday). This year we have added an OData service to the TechEd site, just like we did for MIX10 earlier this year. The service exposes the sessions, speakers and other associated information for the conference and is a great way to learn OData. Check-out the API page on the TechEd site here ...

Chris (aka Woody) Woodruff has organized a series of OData workshops to compliment the official OData Roadshow. This is highly recommended. So if for whatever reason you can’t make it to one of the OData Roadshow events, or you just can’t get enough OData, see if you can get along to one of Chris’ workshops. The workshops start in Raleigh tomorr...

Service Operations in WCF Data Services allow you to create WCF style methods on your service. In general it is good practice to do most of your CRUD operations directly on the entities exposed by your WCF Data Services model but every once in a while you may have a need to do some custom operation that isn’t covered by the model and this is where ...

So far in this series we’ve looked at Windows Authentication. For both Windows and Basic Authentication, Data Services does the authentication handshake and subsequent sending of authentication headers – all without you directly setting a http header. It can do this because there is a higher level abstraction – the Credentials p...

If your Data Service includes entities with a string key, you can run into problems if the keys themselves contain certain restricted characters. For example OData has this uri convention for identifying entities: ~/Feed('key') So if the 'key' contains certain characters it can confuse Uri parsing and processing. Thankfully though Peter Qian, a de...

Imagine you have an OData Service installed on your domain somewhere, probably using the .NET Data Services producer libraries, and you want to authenticate clients against your corporate active directory. How do you do this? On the Serverside First on the IIS box hosting your Data Service you need to turn on integrated security, and you may wan...

Here on the Data Services team we hear many people ask about authentication. Questions like: The answer to these questions, depends a lot upon scenario, in fact each authentication scenario presents unique challenges: As you can see lots of questions. And there is a real risk that people will get their answer wrong. ...