Video of My ØreDev Talk is Up

I'm still at the ØreDev 2013 conference were I did a talk called "Layers Considered Harmful" 2 days ago, and already the video is up. So without further ado; enjoy :-)

Layers Considered Harmful from Øredev Conference on Vimeo.

Instant Nancy Web Development Giveaway

I have 5 ebook copies of my Nancy book to give away in a raffle.
To enter the draw simply share this link - http://www.packtpub.com/nancy-web-development/book - on Twitter or G+ along with the hashtag #InstantNancyFxBook before Thursday the 7th of November when I will draw 5 random winners. I will contact the winners through Twitter or G+ to get the email they want to receive the book at.

In case you're wondering what the book is about here is the appetizer from the publisher's site:

Nancy is a C# web framework which aims to provide you ,the application developer, with an easy path to follow, where things will naturally fall into place and work. Nancy is a powerful, flexible, and lightweight web framework that allows you to get on with your job.

Instant Nancy Web Development will give Readers practical introduction to building, testing, and deploying web applications with Nancy. You will learn how to take full advantage of Nancy to build clean application code, and will see how this code lends itself nicely to test driven development. You will also learn how to hook into Nancy to easily extend the framework.

Instant Nancy Web Development offers you an in-depth exploration of all the major features of the Nancy web framework, from basic routing to deployment in the Cloud, and from model binding to automated tests.

You will learn how to build web applications with Nancy and explore how to build web sites using Razor views. Next, you will learn how to build web based APIs suitable for JavaScript clients, mobile clients, and even desktop applications. In fact, you will learn how to easily combine the two into one.

Finally, you will learn how to leverage Nancy to write clean and maintainable web applications quickly.

Supporting Single Sign On In Your Nancy Applications

In enterprise application the requirement for single sign on is common: Users are already authenticated against the domain controller - they don't want to jump through another authentication hoop to get access to your particular application. Setting this up in ASP.NET using WIF is some pretty easy web.config gymnastics and described elsewhere. The result of this setup is that the current principal on authenticated requests is a ClaimsPrincipal identifying the user in terms of the claims setup for him/her in the identity provided (e.g. your organizations Active Directory).
Below I show how to integrate the WIF authentication setup with your Nancy application - It doesn't take much, but lets run through it anyway. In fact only 2 small classes are needed. First we define a user type that implements the IUserIndentity interface expected by Nancy, by pulling the necessary information out of the current claims principal:

The second thing we need is set the current user on the NancyContext for each incoming request. We do this by hooking into Nancys request pipeline with a Before hook. We can do this directly in our Nancy applications bootstrapper or in a separate type implementing IApplicationStartup (Nancy automatically finds and executes these at application startup). This is how it's done with the IApplicationStartup approach:

That's it. Now your modules can start using the Context.CurrentUser and take advantage of Nancys authorization helpers.

Update: As kindly pointed out by Damian Hickey this will not work if you host your Nancy application on OWIN. So to be clear: I have only tested this when hosting on ASP.NET. The fact that it will not work on OWIN, means that the approach has the drawback that it leaks knowledge of the host to the application level. Specifically to the SetUser class.