Monday, August 29, 2011

Twitter OAuth authentication using .Net - CodeProject

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseIntroduction of the Article

In this article I want to demonstrate how to implement OAuth authentication in .Net. I've previously written about my dislike of third party SDKs for social media integration and how we should leverage technology based solutions instead. One of the sticking points in doing this tends to be that implementing OAuth based authentication is relatively difficult compared with actually making the requests themselves. There is documentation available, but there seems to be a lack of .NET example code to go with it.
In keeping with my thoughts in previous articles I would recommend using open source OAuth based libraries to solve this problem, and again avoid resorting to third party Twitter/Facebook implementations which more strongly couple code to specific APIs. This keeps the solution more reusable and builds on specific technologies to better future proof your application.
I've also previously shown how client-side plugins can be used in combination with server-side code to speed development in this area. However sometimes authentication does need to be implemented purely on the server-side.
So how difficult is this?
It turns out implementing OAuth on the server-side in .Net isn't too difficult, the battle is getting the encoding and authentication signature right. With so few examples it can be a little daunting, so here's an example written in pure .NET using the official Twitter OAuth documentation and a bit of trial and error.


Twitter OAuth authentication using .Net - CodeProject
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