Choosing between accessing WCF via API Endpoint or via Dll reference - c#

I have been contemplating on a dilemma for hours. I have a Visual Studio Solution that contains a WCF, WebForms, UWP, Xamarin and a SharedLibrary Projects.
I intend to use the WCF project as the backend which talks to the database and process Email and SMS integration and feed the other apps.
OPTION A
Currently, The WCF is hosted on an Azure App Service which makes it accessible via POST, GET, etc from the url which is: https://mywcfprojectlink.azurewebsites.net/service1.svc/GetUsers
With such arrangements, I can perform a POST request to get data from the apps:
string response = string.Empty;
string url = "https://mywcfprojectlink.azurewebsites.net/service1.svc/GetUsers";
try
{
var values = new Dictionary<string, string>
{
{ "data", Encryption.EncryptString(dat.ToString()) } //dat is incoming method param
};
string jsonString = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(values);
var cli = new WebClient();
cli.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.ContentType] = "application/json";
response = cli.UploadString($"{url}", jsonString);
var result = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string>(response);
topic.InnerText = Encryption.DecryptString(result.ToString());
}
catch (Exception)
{
return string.Empty;
}
The method above is a simple one as I have other ones where I Deserialize with Models/Classes.
OPTION B
I equally have access to the methods defined in service1 by adding the project reference to my WebForms which surprisingly is also compatible with xamarin but not with UWP. Nevertheless, I am interested in the WebForms scenario. Below is an example method:
using BackEnd;
//Service1 service1 = new Service1();
//var send = service1.GetUsers(dat.ToString()); //dat is incoming method param
//topic.InnerText = send;
Obviously, using the Option B would eliminate the need to encrypt, decrypt, serialize or deserialize the data being sent. However, I have serious performance concerns.
I need to know the better option and if there is yet another alternative (probably an Azure Resource), you can share with me.

If you decide to use https endpoint of the Azure website, option A is secure because of SSL encryption. So you don't have to encrypt/decrypt it by yourself. The only tip is to create a proper authorization mechanism. For example use TransportWithMessageCredential. An example is provided in below article https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1092557/WCF-Security-and-Authentication-in-Azure-WsHttpBin

Related

Google PageSpeed API dotnet .net

I have set up a basic C# application to run a PageSpeed test on a website that I specify using the Google.Apis.Pagespeedonline.v2 nuget package.
The set up is simple enough and I have a variable that I can specify the url which is then past in to the Service
// Create the service.
var service = new PagespeedonlineService(new BaseClientService.Initializer
{
ApplicationName = "PageSpeed Sample",
ApiKey = "[API_KEY_HERE]"
});
var url = "URL_TO_TEST";
// Run the request.
var result = await service.Pagespeedapi.Runpagespeed(url).ExecuteAsync();
The problem being the .Runpagespeed method ONLY accepts URL. I need to be able to specify, at minimum, the 'Mobile' strategy so I can obtain scores for both Desktop and Mobile. I know this is possible in other libraries but seems to be missing in .NET. Is anybody aware of a way to do this using the .NET library? In the reference documentation it implies that the method accepts further optional parameters but it does not in the code.
Pagespeedapi: runpagespeed has an optional value called strategy
strategy string The analysis strategy to use
Acceptable values are: "desktop": Fetch and analyze the URL for
desktop browsers "mobile": Fetch and analyze the URL for mobile
devices
Example:
var request = service.Pagespeedapi.Runpagespeed(url);
request.Strategy = Google.Apis.Pagespeedonline.v2.PagespeedapiResource.RunpagespeedRequest.StrategyEnum.Mobile;
var results = request.Execute();

Facebook Retrive Data using Graph API using c#

i have created desktop Facebook application using c# .net. i want to retrieve users message,post and chat history. which is convenient way to retrieve users all information.i have started with Facebook Graph API but i am not getting any example.
can any one help me ?
A bit late to the party but anyway:
Add a reference to System.Net.Http and Newtonsoft.Json
string userToken = "theusertokentogiveyoumagicalpowers";
using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
client.BaseAddress = new Uri("https://graph.facebook.com");
HttpResponseMessage response = client.GetAsync($"me?fields=name,email&access_token={userToken}").Result;
response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();
string result = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;
var jsonRes = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(result);
var email = jsonRes["email"].ToString();
}
Go to developer.facebook.com -> Tools & Support -> Select Graph API Explorer
Here U get FQL Query, Access Token
Then write code in C#.....
var client = new FacebookClient();
client.AccessToken = Your Access Token;
//show user's profile picture
dynamic me = client.Get("me?fields=picture");
pictureBoxProfile.Load(me.picture.data.url);
//show user's birthday
me = client.Get("me/?fields=birthday");
labelBirthday.Text = Convert.ToString(me.birthday);
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/380635/Csharp-Application-Integration-with-Facebook-Twitt
I hope this will help you.!!!
you can check the Graph explorer tool on Developer.facebook.com , go to Tools and select graph explorer, its a nice tool which gives you exact idea about what you can fetch by sending "GET" and "POST" method on FB Graph APis
From what i see the app now only uses webhooks to post data to a data endpoint (in your app) at which point you can parse and use this. (FQL is deprecated). This is used for things like messaging.
A get request can be send to the API to get info - like the amt. of likes on your page.
The docs of FB explain the string you have to send pretty nicely. Sending requests can be done with the webclient, or your own webrequests.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bay1b5dh(v=vs.110).aspx
Then once you have a string of the JSON formatted page you can parse this using JSON.NET library. It's available as a NUGEt package.

Accessing older GData APIs (Spreadsheet API) using OAuth 2 and a service account

The short question is whether is this possible and if so, how?
Outline
I have a .NET application which currently uses a service account to access information across a Google Apps domain using the Google Drive API. This works fine using the google-api-dotnet-client library and code along the same lines as shown in the samples here - which are currently a very good basic example of what I'm doing.
What I want to do now is extend it so as well as using those APIs provided by the "new" google-api-dotnet-client library, it uses the older "GData" libraries, as provided for via the
older google-gdata library, specifically the Spreadsheets API (and perhaps more to come).
The Problem
This is where the difficulty arises. The former library does exactly what I want, as evidenced by the second link in the first paragraph above - and the fact I have it doing it myself. HOWEVER... although the second library has been updated to support OAuth 2.0 in addition to OAuth 1.0 and the other older auth techniques, it does not - as far as I can tell from extensive Googling and trail-and-error - allow the "service account on behalf of all my users" operation which I need.
My question is whether I'm missing something (possibly a hard to find or undocumented something) which would allow me to do what I want. Failing that, is there any way I could force this behaviour and make these two libraries operate side by side?
The ideal solution
Ideally I would love some way of having the Google.GData.Spreadsheets.SpreadsheetsService instance be able to take advantage of the Google.Apis.Authentication.Auth2Authenticator<AssertionFlowClient> instance I'm already using... somehow. Is such witchcraft possible? I'm I missing the obvious?
Failing that, I'm happy to do the whole OAuth2 "assertion flow client" dance again if I have to, in some way that the older library can handle.
Help?
Other Thoughts
I have considered - and rejected for the time being - the option of starting from scratch and writing my own library to make this happen. This is for two reasons:
The gdata library already exists, and has been developed by many people likely cleverer than myself. I'm not so arrogant that I believe I can do better.
I'm not certain the OAuth2 with service account approach is even supported/allowed on these older APIs.
An alternate approach which I've been hoping to avoid but may have to fall back to depending on the answers here will be to use 2-legged OAuth 1.0 for portions of this. I'd prefer not to, as having parts of the app rely on one old auth method whilst other parts do it the nice new way just feels wrong to me. And there's that much more to go wrong...
Updates
I have considered the possibility of subclassing GDataRequestFactory and GDataRequest so I can make my own request factory and have that take the instance of Google.Apis.Authentication.Auth2Authenticator<AssertionFlowClient> (well, an instance of Google.Apis.Authentication.IAuthenticator anyway) which could step in to authenticate the request just before it's called. However... the constructor for GDataRequest is internal, which has stopped me.
It's really looking like this isn't meant to be.
For the sake of other folks coming across this question (now that the solution linked to in the accepted answer uses deprecated code), here's how I solved it:
First, start in "new API" land (use the Google.Apis.Auth nuget package) by setting up a ServiceAccountCredential following Google's Service Account example:
//In the old api, this accessed the main api accounts' sheets, not anymore
//** Important ** share spreadsheets with the Service Account by inviting the "serviceAccountEmail" address to the sheet
string serviceAccountEmail = "12345697-abcdefghijklmnop#developer.gserviceaccount.com";
var certificate = new X509Certificate2(#"key.p12", "notasecret", X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable);
ServiceAccountCredential credential = new ServiceAccountCredential(
new ServiceAccountCredential.Initializer(serviceAccountEmail)
{
Scopes = new[] { "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds", "https://docs.google.com/feeds" }
}.FromCertificate(certificate));
Tell the credential to request an Access Token:
credential.RequestAccessTokenAsync(System.Threading.CancellationToken.None).Wait();
Now it's time to switch back to "old API" land (use the Google.GData.Spreadsheets nuget package). Start by constructing the SpreadsheetsService (similar to Google's example):
SpreadsheetsService service = new SpreadsheetsService("MySpreadsheetIntegration-v1");
To use Service Account authentication, we'll create an instance of the GDataRequestFactory and set a custom Authorization header:
var requestFactory = new GDataRequestFactory("My App User Agent");
requestFactory.CustomHeaders.Add(string.Format("Authorization: Bearer {0}", credential.Token.AccessToken));
Finally, set the SpreadsheetsService's RequestFactory property to this new factory:
service.RequestFactory = requestFactory;
And go ahead and use the SpreadsheetsService as you would had you authenticated using any other technique. (Tip: share spreadsheets with the Service Account by inviting the serviceAccountEmail address to the sheet)
I managed to solve this by subclassing GDataRequestFactory and creating my own implementation of the interfaces implemented by GDataRequest. This implementation wraps an instance of GDataRequest instantiated via reflection, and adds in the necessary code to perform authentication using an instance of IAuthenticator (in my case, Auth2Authenticator).
I wrote a blog post on it and added an example as a Gist:
Blog: Using Google's Spreadsheet API using .NET, OAuth 2.0 and a Service Account
Gist 4244834
Feel free to use this if it helps you (BSD licence).
Hey just stumbled accross the same problem and produced a different solution:
Has anybody ever concidered of writing the parameters from the credentials-object directly to an OAuth2Parameters-Object?
I did this and it worked nicely:
public class OAuthTest
{
OAuth2Parameters param = new OAuth2Parameters();
public OAuthTest()
{
Debug.WriteLine("Calling: AuthGoogleDataInterface()");
bool init = AuthGoogleDataInterface();
if (init)
{
GOAuth2RequestFactory requestFactory = new GOAuth2RequestFactory(null, "My App User Agent", this.param);
//requestFactory.CustomHeaders.Add(string.Format("Authorization: Bearer {0}", credential.Token.AccessToken));
var service = new SpreadsheetsService("MyService");
service.RequestFactory = requestFactory;
SpreadsheetQuery query = new SpreadsheetQuery();
// Make a request to the API and get all spreadsheets.
SpreadsheetFeed feed = service.Query(query);
// Iterate through all of the spreadsheets returned
foreach (SpreadsheetEntry entry in feed.Entries)
{
// Print the title of this spreadsheet to the screen
Debug.WriteLine(entry.Title.Text);
}
}
Debug.WriteLine(m_Init);
}
private bool AuthGoogleDataInterface()
{
bool b_success;
try
{
Console.WriteLine("New User Credential");
// New User Credential
UserCredential credential;
using (var stream = new FileStream("client_secrets.json", FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
{
GoogleClientSecrets GCSecrets = GoogleClientSecrets.Load(stream);
string[] ArrScope = new[] { "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds", "https://docs.google.com/feeds" };
credential = GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync(
GCSecrets.Secrets,
ArrScope,
"user", CancellationToken.None,
new FileDataStore("My.cal")).Result;
// put the Information generated for the credentials object into the OAuth2Parameters-Object to access the Spreadsheets
this.param.ClientId = GCSecrets.Secrets.ClientId; //CLIENT_ID;
this.param.ClientSecret = GCSecrets.Secrets.ClientSecret; //CLIENT_SECRET;
this.param.RedirectUri = "urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob"; //REDIRECT_URI;
this.param.Scope = ArrScope.ToString();
this.param.AccessToken = credential.Token.AccessToken;
this.param.RefreshToken = credential.Token.RefreshToken;
}
Debug.WriteLine("AuthGoogleDataInterface: Success");
b_success = true;
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Debug.WriteLine(e.ToString());
b_success = false;
}
return b_success;
}
}

Copy a Google Docs Spreadsheet using Google .NET API

I'm wanting to copy an already existing Google Docs Spreadsheet to a new Google Docs spreadsheet. I dont think the v2.0 .NET API can handle it natively (or if so I can't find the class/method), however It looks like the v3.0 protocol can but I'm not sure how to implement this in the current framework or even if it is possible with the current .net api. eg. ~DocumentsFeed.copy() (pseudo code).
Exporting to a temp excel file then uploading with a new name is not possible either as some of the complex formulas get messed up in the conversion process.
I am a bit of a .NET noob so any info would be greatly appreciated eg. How would I go about doing this in .NET if I could only use the v3 protocol (ajax etc) and not the .NET API.
Thanks
EDIT: (final class thanks to #langsamu for his help!)
using System;
using Google.GData.Documents;
using Google.GData.Client;
using Google.GData.Extensions;
public class GoogleDocument
{
private DocumentsService ds;
private String username;
private String password;
public GoogleDocument(String username, String password)
{
this.ds = new DocumentsService("doc service name");
this.username = username;
this.password = password;
this.ds.setUserCredentials(username, password);
this.ds.QueryClientLoginToken();
}
public void copyDocument(String oldFileName, String newFileName)
{
SpreadsheetQuery query = new Google.GData.Documents.SpreadsheetQuery();
query.Title = oldFileName;
query.TitleExact = true;
DocumentsFeed feed = this.ds.Query(query);
AtomEntry entry = feed.Entries[0];
entry.Title.Text = newFileName;
var feedUri = new Uri(DocumentsListQuery.documentsBaseUri);
this.ds.Insert(feedUri, entry);
}
}
Google.GData.Documents.DocumentsService service = new Google.GData.Documents.DocumentsService("YOUR_APPLICATIONS_NAME");
service.setUserCredentials("YOUR_USERNAME", "YOUR_PASSWORD");
Google.GData.Documents.SpreadsheetQuery query = new Google.GData.Documents.SpreadsheetQuery();
query.Title = "YOUR_SPREADSHEETS_TITLE";
query.TitleExact = true;
Google.GData.Documents.DocumentsFeed feed = service.Query(query);
Google.GData.Client.AtomEntry entry = feed.Entries[0];
var feedUri = new Uri(Google.GData.Documents.DocumentsListQuery.documentsBaseUri);
service.Insert(feedUri, entry);
This solution is basically about retrieving an existing spreadsheet (service.Query) using the Document List API and re-inserting it (service.Insert).
Make sure you replace the ALL CAPS application name, username, password and spreadsheet title.
Add a reference to Google.GData.Documents.
This is using .NET 4 (should work with lower versions as well) and Google Documents List Data API v2.0 (DLL says version is 1.6.0.0: google-gdata), which seems to use version 3.0 of the protocol.
It is a bit unclear if you are developing a web application or a desktop application, so I'll try and cover both (essentially they are very much alike - because...).
If you are developing a web application you won't be able to make a 100% AJAX solution. You will only be able to request URL's on the same domain. To do this you will need to either do the communication server side only, or do it server side and proxy it to your web app through AJAX.
If you are developing a desktop application you'll have to do this stuff aswell. Except the AJAX part.
An example app would be fairly easy - 2-3 hours work to whip up considering the documentation given. With just a little knowledge of HTTP and POST request forming you should be able to make it work.

What is the best way to secure a webservice?

As the title allready explains I want to secure my webservice.
I've read that you can do this using an soap authentication header, but then the username en password are passed as plain text.
I was wondering what I should do to secure my webservice?
Examples would be great.
I have an example of a company we work with that has 2 webservices.
One to do the security and one to get the needed data but I don't have their side of the code the system looks great though:
bool loginSuccessFull = false;
/// knooppunt
string loginID = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["WebServiceLogin"];
string password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["WebServicePass"];
//A. The m_SecurityService object is created and initialised
Security securityService = new Security();
securityService.CookieContainer = new System.Net.CookieContainer();
string challenge = securityService.InitializeLogin(loginID);
string pwd = password;
string response = pwd + challenge;
System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider SHA1 = new System.Security.Cryptography.SHA1CryptoServiceProvider();
SHA1.Initialize();
byte[] hash = SHA1.ComputeHash(System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(response));
System.Text.StringBuilder builder = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
foreach (byte b in hash)
builder.Append(b.ToString("x2"));
//2. A login is done with the m_SecurityService object
if (securityService.Login(builder.ToString()))
{
string ssoToken = Request.QueryString["SSOTOKEN"];
string ssoID = Request.QueryString["SSOID"];
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(ssoToken) && !String.IsNullOrEmpty(ssoID))
{
// Check with webserice if the token is valid.
Knooppunt.SSO.GenericSSO sso = new Knooppunt.SSO.GenericSSO();
sso.CookieContainer = securityService.CookieContainer;
try
{
if (sso.validateSSOToken(Convert.ToInt32(ssoID), ssoToken))
{
loginSuccessFull = true;
FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage("default user", false);
}
}
catch
{ }
}
}
If it truly is a webservice, you should be using Windows Communication Foundation to generate the proxy and make the call. It makes a lot of this code much, much easier.
Honestly, it looks like the package that is used to connect to the web service that you are using (SSO?) is pretty non-standard, and does nothing more than derive from HttpWebRequest, which is VERY low-level, and too complex to use.
If you are going to secure your own web service (and you are exposing it over an HTTP channel), the easiest way is to get a digital certificate for your host and then use basic HTTP authentication over HTTPS.
You could also use other aspects of the WS-Security specifications (e.g. encoding the message, etc, etc) to secure your service.
Note that WCF supports all of these options, so you don't have to do any of this coding out of the box, and you can host it in IIS as well.
A good beginners reference to WCF is Michelle Bustamante's "Learning WCF: A Hands-On Guide".
After that, for more advanced WCF content (especially if you want to learn about concepts revolving around security in WCF and WS-* in general) I highly recommend "Programming WCF Services" by Juval Lowy.

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