About Windows Phone 7 and SharePoint authentication

Connecting the phone to our SharePoint environment was my Christmas project, and it took me a while... In the end I managed to do it and I thought it could be a good idea to share the joy. Besides, I have read a lot of blogs about this matter all of them? and I want to add my contribution to it.

Let's go to the matter. I created a class called SPAuthBridge from the code in the SDK that can be used to set up the connections to the SharePoint server.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

namespace PhoneUtils.Code
{
    public class SPAuthBridge
    {
        #region Properties
        public CookieContainer cookieJar = new CookieContainer();

        string SiteUrl, User;
        string Password; //This should be securestring, but I don't think it's available in WP7
        #endregion

        #region Constructors
        public SPAuthBridge(string SiteUrl, string User, string Password)
        {
            this.SiteUrl = SiteUrl;
            this.User = User;
            this.Password = Password;
        }
        #endregion

        #region Public Methods
        public void Authenticate()
        {
            try
            {
                if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(SiteUrl)) throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("The SPAuthBridge was not properly initialized");

                System.Uri authServiceUri = new Uri(string.Format("{0}/_vti_bin/authentication.asmx", SiteUrl));

                HttpWebRequest spAuthReq = HttpWebRequest.Create(authServiceUri) as HttpWebRequest;
                spAuthReq.CookieContainer = cookieJar;
                spAuthReq.Headers["SOAPAction"] = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/Login";
                spAuthReq.ContentType = "text/xml; charset=utf-8";
                spAuthReq.Method = "POST";

                //add the soap message to the request
                spAuthReq.BeginGetRequestStream(new AsyncCallback(spAuthReqCallBack), spAuthReq);
            }
            catch
            {
                TriggerOnAuthenticated(false);
            }
        }
        #endregion

        #region Private Methods
        private void spAuthReqCallBack(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
        {
            string envelope =
                    @"<?xml version=""1.0"" encoding=""utf-8""?>
                    <soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"" xmlns:xsd=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"" xmlns:soap=""http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"">
                      <soap:Body>
                        <Login xmlns=""http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/"">
                          <username>{0}</username>
                          <password>{1}</password>
                        </Login>
                      </soap:Body>
                    </soap:Envelope>";

            UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)asyncResult.AsyncState;
            Stream _body = request.EndGetRequestStream(asyncResult);
            envelope = string.Format(envelope, User, Password);
            byte[] formBytes = encoding.GetBytes(envelope);

            _body.Write(formBytes, 0, formBytes.Length);
            _body.Close();

            request.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback(ResponseCallback), request);
        }

        private void ResponseCallback(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
        {
            try
            {
                HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)asyncResult.AsyncState;
                HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.EndGetResponse(asyncResult);
                Stream content = response.GetResponseStream();

                if (request != null && response != null)
                {
                    if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
                    {
                        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(content))
                        {
                            //Put debugging code here
                            string _responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();
                            reader.Close();
                        }
                    }
                }

                //authentication complete
                TriggerOnAuthenticated(true);
            }
            catch
            {
                TriggerOnAuthenticated(false);
            }
        }
        #endregion

        #region Events
        public delegate void OnAuthenticatedHandler(bool Success);

        public event OnAuthenticatedHandler OnAuthenticated;

        protected virtual void TriggerOnAuthenticated(bool Success)
        {
            if (OnAuthenticated != null)
                OnAuthenticated(Success);
        }
        #endregion
    }
}

The way to use this class is fairly simple, you create the SPAuthBridge object, you call the Authenticate method and you are ready to go, something like this:

        StratexWP7SoapClient StratexWP7 = new StratexWP7SoapClient(); //This is my web service
        SPAuthBridge SharePointAuth;

        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            (...)

            SharePointAuth = new SPAuthBridge(SiteUrl, Username, Password);
            SharePointAuth.OnAuthenticated += new SPAuthBridge.OnAuthenticatedHandler(SharePointAuth_OnAuthenticated);

            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(Password))
                SharePointAuth.Authenticate();
            else
                MessageBox.Show("The application should be configured before use.");
        }

        void SharePointAuth_OnAuthenticated(bool Success)
        {
            if (!Success)
            {
                Deployment.Current.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() =>
                    { MessageBox.Show("There was an error on the authentication procedure. Please check the configuration."); });

                return;
            }

            StratexWP7.CookieContainer = SharePointAuth.cookieJar; //This is all you have to do to connect your web service. \m/ O.O \m/

            HookEvents();

            RequestData();
        }

It looks great when it works…

(By the way the charts are from AmCharts)