How can I impersonate a different user while opening a virtual directory?

Question

We have an ASP.NET (3.5) application which uses Forms Authentication to authenticate accounts. On the logon form, I also get a windows login token using LogonUser, which I use to impersonate the logged on user for browsing private directories (the files are displayed in a GridView, and the user is impersonated just before the data is bound.) I just learned that we also need to impersonate the user in a virtual directory. Is there a way for me to impersonate just before the virtual directory is loaded, or across the entire application without switching to Windows Authentication?

Answer 1

While this article is a few years old, it does a good job of explaining impersonation and delegation. It dicusses setting up virtual directories to support this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998351.aspx

Answer 2

If you are just performing a single task (like accessing a network resource) I like to use an existing AD account I create just for such purposes and call it in-code.

I like to abstract out the example found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306158, into a helper class. This will allow to do something like this...

helperImpersonate hI = new helperImpersonate();

if (hI.impersonateValidUser("ADUSERNAME", "DOMAIN", "PASSWORD"))
{

   //DO STUFF HERE...  

    hI.undoImpersonation(); //undo the impersoination
}//end if impersonate is true...