I am working on a .NET 2.0 winforms application that calls an ASP.NET 2.0 website. The website is authenticated using forms authentication. The authentication service is enabled in the web.config, and I have done some experiments to confirm that I can access the service via JSON.
Here is my question: is there any built-in code to consume the System.Web.Extensions web services (authenticationService, profileService, etc.) in a purely .NET environment (not ASP.NET)? I can find examples using Silverlight and the later WCF services, but not anything in a 2.0 environment on both client and server. Adding the authentication service as a web service seems like the logical approach, but I could never get it to work pointing to my development server - I suppose that could be a separate question.
If I have to manage the AJAX request and response at a lower level, it's certainly doable, but if something were already intended for this purpose it would certainly be easier and less error-prone.