ASP.NET Enterprise Single Sign-On with BlackBerry Smartphones

Posted on 8/07/2008

Update 7/27/13: BlackBerry has removed the developer journal from their web site (it's quite old by now), but for the sake of removing broken links and keeping this here for sentimental reasons, the download links are below.
Example web site hierarchy used for SSO in the article

Example web site hierarchy used for SSO in the article

My article about single sign-on (SSO) using ASP.NET and BlackBerry devices was just published in the August 2008 BlackBerry Developer Journal.

Download the article
Download the sample code

I was able to work a lot of concepts into the article, the following being a small sample of the variety.

Cookie authentication
Kerberos S4U2Self implementation
Custom .NET configuration section
Application of the Page Controller and Intercepting Filter (and why it's so cool for IIS 7) architecture patterns

One of the cool takeaways included in the sample code is a method in C# that simulates ASP.NET's Active Directory authorization check.
Writing is so much more time consuming than I originally imagined. It was definitely a learning process. I now have much more of an appreciation for those that set out to write an entire book.

Technorati Tags: BlackBerry,SSO,ASP.NET,authentication,cookie,enterprise,architecture,pattern,page controller,intercepting filter,S4U2Self

5 comments:

ChrisOctober 27, 2008 at 4:42 AM
Hi Tim, the links to the article seemed to have been dropped. Any ideas where this can be found now?

Thank you.
Chris
Tim JonesOctober 27, 2008 at 1:03 PM
Chris, RIM has the BlackBerry Developer Journal section of their site down temporarily, but I have updated the printable link in the post so you can download the PDF. -Tim
EstherJune 21, 2010 at 4:37 PM
Hi Tim - do you know if there is a way to accomplish this by now that doesn't rely on cookies? Do you know if there is a way to get around the password prompt when using Windows Authentication on the current BlackBerries?
Tim JonesJune 30, 2010 at 11:44 PM
Esther, check out BB article DB-00435 (search for it in their online knowledge base). It mentions a setting that can be enabled that will allow you to uniquely identify the blackberry device via HTTP headers in the request.
Tim JonesJuly 27, 2013 at 10:09 AM
Just updated this post to fix broken links to BlackBerry's site since they've taken down all of this content.