OAuth.net

OAuth is one of those technologies that when first understood makes your mind race with the possibilities. Authentication is a dry subject at the best of times, but OAuth shines not because the technology is cool, but because it has the capability to fundamentally change the way people use the web.

Today Madgex open-sourced OAuth.net, which as it sounds is an OAuth library for .net. This is a spin off from an internal research project we are working on.

OAuth.net provides full OAuth consumer and provider support to the core specification. The library facilitates secure API authentication in a simple and standard method for desktop and web applications. We are putting the full source code with a MIT licence on Google code.

http://lab.madgex.com/oauth-net/ /> http://code.google.com/p/oauth-dot-net/

The thing that really stuck in my mind when I started to investigate OAuth was the joy of the user experience. With sometimes as little as 2 clicks I can share data between sites, which would of taken me ages to re-enter. Somehow this /> experience has that nice feeling like using the iPhone interface for the first time. Maybe it’s just because I am so sick of re-entering things over and over again.

I have been fascinated with allowing users to share information for over 3 years now, whatever the name used Portable Social Networks, Social Graph or Data Portability.

There is a vast amount of publically available data about each of us embedded in the pages of sites we use. There are hundreds of millions of social network profile pages. The Microformats community has done a great job defining practical ways to extract semantic structures of data, but the issues of privacy, authentication and authorisation are beyond its scope.

OAuth allows users to share data between sites which they do not wish to make public. It does this without resorting to the heinous practice of asking a user to hand over their account details for other sites.

If you have a Google mail account take a look at this demo. It is a very simple demo, but it shows you some of the power of the concept.

http://lab.madgex.com/oauth-net/googlecontacts/

There are also demos for Fire Eagle and extracting protected Microformat resources.

OAuth.net is the first full library for .net. Our hope is that by sharing some of our work it will help move forward the adoption of OAuth. I will be talking about OAuth and OAuth.net at Barcamp London 5 on 27/28 September. Bruce Boughton one of the libraries developers will be talking about the project at Barcamp Brighton 3 on 6/7 September.

Enjoy