Azure Mobile Services - custom authentication provider for all our apps

4
votes

We plan to use Windows Azure Mobile Services for several of our commercial apps and would like to create a single data store for users instead of creating it for every mobile service. We don't want to use Microsoft or Facebook... providers due to this issue Multiple apps using a single Azure Mobile Service for Live Authentication?

This way, the user data for all our apps is stored in single separate Custom_Auth database and the users won't need to Register again for our other apps. Should we create a separate mobile service that basically enables custom authentication and acts as a provider for other apps? Do you see any pitfalls with this approach and what steps would I need to take for creating this custom provider as a separate mobile service?

Basically, we want to create our own provider so that user of one our apps can login to the other apps using the same credentials.

I have read through the following links. Posting them here as they may be useful for others starting out with Authentication and Azure Mobile Services.

http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Generating_your_own_ZUMO_auth_token_Day_8_.aspx

http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Fetching_a_basic_user_profile_in_Mobile_Services_Day_9_.aspx

http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Exploring_custom_identity_in_Mobile_Services_Day_12_.aspx

http://chrisrisner.com/Authentication-with-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services

Thanks in advance

1
azureazure-mobile-services
I tried to implement custom authentication as given in joy's site and end up boiling my blood. These tutorials are outdated as some api's given in the example (iOS specifically) outdated. IMHO, microsoft being so ignorant towards not supporting custom authentication out of the box. Take parse.com, custom authentication is piece of cake. – Jay Mayu
oh btw coming back to your question, there is something called Azure Active Directory, that might help you in this regard. – Jay Mayu
@MayuMayooresan thanks for the tip. Let me look at Parse – Pratik Kothari
I figured out a solution and posted it here: stackoverflow.com/questions/25347421/… – Adam

1 Answers

0
votes

Hope this helps you

http://chrisrisner.com/Authentication-with-iOS-and-Windows-Azure-Mobile-Services

Someone created a custom authentication API using AZURE

with Parse.com, you are limited to their backend and unfortunately it doesn't have all the nice features as Azure

MS really messed us around with this