Azure Mobile Services Authentication with Local .NET Backend

Question

For unimportant reasons I work mainly in an offline development environment, so it is really important to me to be able to do my development 'offline'. For this reason I am very keen on the Azure Mobile Services .NET backend project, which allows you to run your Azure Mobile Services from IIS Express locally.

I have fought very hard to get this working, and have spent many hours trying to make this IIS service properly visible to my Android and IOS emulators (which I have finally managed to achieve).

However, when it comes to authentication I seem to have hit a dead-end. I originally tried to implement custom authentication, which was a massive undertaking, and despite several promising leads (including an article on that very same subject published by Microsoft which could never work - very frustrating http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/mobile-services-dotnet-backend-get-started-custom-authentication/ ). I drew a blank.

In desperation I tried the more 'traditional' authentication methods (Facebook, Microsoft, Google etc) but none of them work either on the local IIS azure.

It is beginning to dawn on me that I may have completely wasted my time. Can it be true that the local Azure Mobile project only works in some very limited scenarios.

I would really love someone in the know to confirm what is and isn't possible with the local Azure Mobile .NET backend, as I am starting to become desperate.

Many thanks in anticipation.

Answer 1

For me it's the opposite. I can only get the custom authentication to work 'offline'. I used the same tutorial you used to set up the login provider. Then I used this answer to figure out how to use it on the client.

You might have a problem, like I am, when publishing it to Azure, but for 'offline' use it would work. I think it's because it uses a local database which it can't see once it's in azure.

Hopefully this helped.