Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Forms Authentication - Passing those credentials to other ASP.NET Forms Authentication Apps

Question

Sorry for the poor title here :)

I have my WSS configured for Forms Authentication. I'd like my users to land on the WSS login page, log in, and then provide them links to other ASP.NET apps which also are configured for forms authentication. I'd like to achieve a single-signon-ish solution (the reason I say "ish" is I'm not looking to implement SSO per-se, as in SAML, but rather achieve the similar effect of not forcing the user to re-enter their credentials). You can assume the forms auth credentials that WSS uses are the SAME as those in the subsequent forms auth apps I want to provide the links to.

Does this require code on the WSS side, or can I make this happen non-programmatically on the ASP.NET/IIS configuration side?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,

What is your Forms Authentication Provider?

On Active Directory (for instance) your browser will remember what your authentication was on the first entry site and carry it for you.

Having this on the web.config file of both ASP.NET and SharePoint sites:

    <connectionStrings>
      <add name="ADConnectionString" 
       connectionString=
       "LDAP://testdomain.test.com/CN=Users,DC=testdomain,DC=test,DC=com" />
     </connectionStrings>


<membership defaultProvider="MyADMembershipProvider">
  <providers>
    <add
       name="MyADMembershipProvider"
       type="System.Web.Security.ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider, 
             System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, 
             Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"
       connectionStringName="ADConnectionString"
       connectionUsername="testdomain\administrator" 
       connectionPassword="password"/>
  </providers>
 </membership>

Will ensure they will both use the same authentication providers and therefore once the browser has the information about their identity, it will recycle it accordingly throughout.

Other wise, try a Federation Service.

Here is a tutorial on how to use ADFS

Answer 2

Hi Ric thanks for the response. I think I found my answer. Forms authentication is all about the cookie, so if I configure both the ASP.NET web app and the Sharepoint virtual directory to use the same authentication cookie, I should get single-sign on between them. I'm going to try.

UPDATE: This works nicely.