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Friday, March 14, 2014

C#: Authenticating with Active Directory

Hi! :)

If you work in a corporate environment, chances are that your Windows machine is connected to a domain based on Active Directory. In today's article, we're going to write a very simple program that allows us to verify a user's credentials for the domain using Active Directory.

In order to try this out, you're going to need an Active Directory domain. In my case, I installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and followed these instructions to set up a domain, which I called "ranch.local". You may also be able to connect to your domain at work to save yourself the trouble of setting this up.

Let us now create a new Console Application using either SharpDevelop or Visual Studio. After adding a reference to System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement, add the following statement near the top of your Program.cs file:

using System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement;

Next, remove any code in Main() and add a simple prompt for the username and password to authenticate against Active Directory:

            // prompt for username

            Console.Write("Username: ");
            string username = Console.ReadLine();

            // prompt for password

            Console.Write("Password: ");
            string password = Console.ReadLine();

For the authentication part, we can use a simple method described here. After obtaining a reference to the domain using the PrincipalContext class (specifying the domain as a parameter), we simply use the ValidateCredentials() method to perform the authentication. This gives us a boolean value indicating whether the authentication was successful or not.

            // authenticate

            using (PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "RANCH"))
            {
                bool authenticated = pc.ValidateCredentials(username, password);

                if (authenticated)
                    Console.WriteLine("Authenticated");
                else
                    Console.WriteLine("Get lost.");
            }

At this point, we need only add a simple statement to wait for user input before letting the application terminate:

            Console.ReadLine();

Now, we can build our application and test it on the server (or on any machine that is part of the domain). First, let's try a valid login:


Very good! And now, a user that doesn't even exist:


Excellent! As you can see, it only takes a couple of lines of code to perform authentication against Active Directory. I hope you found this useful. Follow the Ranch to read more articles like this! :)

1 comment:

  1. I am using this code in a web application where a user enters a username and password to enter. I am using the above code on the button_click event of the code. Although this works for me in a console application like above, this is not working for me in my web app. It returns a false for the same user in my web app which it authenticates in a console app like yours.
    Any ideas?

    ReplyDelete

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