Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Authenticating with ADAL

Previous posts in this sequence:
Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Multi-Targeting in Visual Studio
Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and SDK Versions
Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms with MvvmCross

Now that we’ve got the basics of an application, we’re going to add some authentication using the Azure Active Directory Authentication Library. We’re going to start with registering an application with Azure Active Directory (AAD) (the docs do cover this here but I figured I’d cover it again anyway). Start by heading over to the Azure portal and selecting Azure Active Directory from the set of tabs on the left.

In the list of tabs for the AAD, find the App Registrations tab

Click “New application registration” and fill in the details for the new app

Note that the Sign-on URL doesn’t have to be a real URL, just one that both the portal and the app know about – we’ll use this later! After you’re done creating the app registration you should be able to retrieve the Application ID. Save this information for later as we’ll need it when we’re authenticating the user within our application.

The pieces of information you’ll need in order to use ADAL within your application are:

clientId – This is the Application ID that was displayed after you created the app registration in the Azure portal. This is a GUID

redirectUri – This is the Redirect URI that you specified when creating the app registration. If you didn’t write this down, or you want to double check, or change it, you can do so by clicking the Redirect URIs tab under Settings for the app registration. This is a URL (e.g. https://stratapark)

resourceId – This is the identifier of the resource you want to access. In this case we just want to authenticate the user, so we’re going to use the default resource, which is the AAD directory itself, https://graph.windows.net/. This can be a URL or a GUID depending on the type of resource you’re referencing

tenantId – This is the identifier of the tenant that you’re authenticating against. This can be the URL or GUID of your tenant.

To retrieve the tenantId you need to select the Properties tab of the Azure Active Directory and copy the Directory ID

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory/

Now that we’ve setup the app registration, we’re good to start writing some code. Firstly, we need to add a reference to the ADAL library from NuGet – search for Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory

Add the ADAL library to all projects.

Let’s start with the UI and add a button to the MainPage.

<Button Text=”Authenticate” Command=”{Binding AuthenticateCommand}” />

And of course we need a command within the MainViewModel. In fact we’ll add the bulk of the authentication code to the MainViewModel too:

private IMvxCommand authenticateCommand;
public IMvxCommand AuthenticateCommand => authenticateCommand ?? (authenticateCommand = new MvxAsyncCommand(Authenticate));

private const string AuthEndpoint = “https://login.microsoftonline.com/{0}/oauth2/token”;

private const string ResourceId= “https://graph.windows.net/”;

private const string TenantId = “[your tenantId]”;
private const string ClientId = “[your clientId]”;
private const string RedirectURI = “[your redirectUri]”;

public async Task Authenticate()
{
     string authority = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, AuthEndpoint, TenantId);
     var authContext = new AuthenticationContext(authority);

    var result = await authContext.AcquireTokenAsync(ResourceId, ClientId, new Uri(RedirectURI), PlatformParameters);
     Debug.WriteLine( result.AccessToken);
}

The only thing missing is the PlatformParameters (bolded in the code above). As the name suggests, these are platform specific parameters required by the ADAL library. For each platform we need to expose a property that returns an IPlatformParameters within the MainViewModel.Platform.cs for each platform.

Android

private IPlatformParameters PlatformParameters => new PlatformParameters(CurrentActivity, true, PromptBehavior.Auto);
public Activity CurrentActivity
{
     get
     {
         var top = Mvx.IoCProvider.Resolve<IMvxAndroidCurrentTopActivity>();
         return top.Activity;
     }
}

iOS

private IPlatformParameters PlatformParameters => new PlatformParameters(GetTopViewController(),true, PromptBehavior.Auto);
public static UIViewController GetTopViewController()
{
     var window = UIApplication.SharedApplication.KeyWindow;
     var vc = window.RootViewController;
     while (vc.PresentedViewController != null)
         vc = vc.PresentedViewController;

    if (vc is UINavigationController navController)
         vc = navController.ViewControllers.Last();

    return vc;
}

UAP

private IPlatformParameters PlatformParameters => new PlatformParameters(PromptBehavior.Always, false);

NetStandard

private IPlatformParameters PlatformParameters => null;

Note: you need to provide the NetStandard implementation otherwise the NetStandard target won’t build.

There is one more thing we need to add. Android requires an additional piece of code within the Activity that hosts the Xamarin.Forms application

protected override void OnActivityResult(int requestCode, Result resultCode, Intent data)
{
     base.OnActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data);
     AuthenticationAgentContinuationHelper.SetAuthenticationAgentContinuationEventArgs(requestCode, resultCode, data);
}

If your Android application authenticates but doesn’t ever return the access token, chances are that your OnActivityResult override is either missing, or on the wrong Activity – I spent a bit of time trying to work out why iOS and UWP worked but Android would just hang; turns out I was missing this override.

There you have it – you’re good to go with using ADAL to authenticate your users within your Xamarin.Forms application