Things I’ve Learnt This Week (5th February)

I’m keeping up my plan (week 2 yay!) to record and share things I’ve learned during the last week. Less from me this week as it’s been fairly hectic and I’ve been feeling a bit unwell.

Things I’ve Learned

Identity Server 4

As part of my work for Humanitarian Toolbox I’ve been actively investigating Identity Server 4 as an option to handle our authentication. The allReady application currently uses ASP.NET Core Identity within the application to support login and user management. As the product nears v1 release discussions have begun around the use cases for the application, including potential for multi-tenancy and considerations around storage of user accounts. As a result this led Richard Campbell to suggest we look into Identity Server 4 to help with this identity flow.

I was lucky enough to have an audience with Brock Allen and Dominick Baier this week to chat through some of the basics about Identity Server. It was really useful to chat with them both and I want to thank them for offering their time and support to the project. One of the key take-aways for me from the call was getting a better understanding of where Identity server fits into the puzzle. It’s about authentication and helping with the protocol of OAuth2 / OpenId communications. It’s not a user management / user store product, although it does sit nicely on top of ASP.NET Core Identity 3 as an option.

As I continue investigating and testing Identity Server 4, I hope to put together some more details posts about how we’re using it and what I learn along the way.

Things I’ve Read

In no particular order here’s some of the blogs and posts that I’ve read this week.

• Welcome to IdentityServer4 – Documentation – Lots of time spent here, understanding the Identity Server concepts.
• EF Core CLI Commands with VS2017 RC3
• Message queues & you – 12 reasons to use message queuing
• How Do You Fix An Impossible Bug?
• What happened to my Thread.CurrentPrincipal
• .NET Core 2.0 Changes – 5 Things to Know
• Mediatr Behaviours Documentation
• MediatR Behaviors
• Microsoft Azure Functions locks in on serverless computing

Things I’ve Listened To

• .NET Rocks – Nodatime, Google Cloud and More with Jon Skeet
• .NET Rocks – Data and Docker with Stephanie Locke
• .NET Rocks – IdentityServer4 with Brock Allen and Dominick Baier
• Hanselminutes – Discovering WebVR with Ada Rose Edwards

Things I’ve Watched

• Entity Framework Core with Julie Lerman
• Dominick Baier on Identity Server – This is a great video with Dominick Baier which really helped me to cement my understanding of some of the key concepts around identity and security concepts. Highly recommended!
• NDC London 2016 – Introduction to IdentityServer – Brock Allen – A demo of using Identity Server 3.
• NDC Sydney 2016 – Modern Authentication – Rob Moore – A nice talk introducing the concepts, terminology and some of the flows for auth.
• NDC Sydney 2016 – Let’s talk Auth – Jordan Knight – Not only a good insight into some Identity related information, this talk taught me a few new things about Middleware. Lots of demo code as well as a look at using Azure Functions. Well worth a watch even if you’re not specifically doing Identity.