Tag Archives: Windows Phone 7

When attempting to develop Windows Phone 7 Applications that connect to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the first issues that a developer will face is determining how to authenticate to SharePoint. Because Windows Phone 7 does not support Windows Authentication (NTLM), it is not possible to call the out-of-the-box SharePoint web services without first enabling Forms Based Authentication (FBA) and then configuring a claims provider that supports Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) which will allow FBA to be performed using Active Directory Accounts. If FBA is not a valid option, another option that can be used to perform authentication from Windows Phone 7 is by leveraging Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG). While these options are both valid approaches and successfully open SharePoint up to Windows Phone 7 applications, they both require a change to the underlying SharePoint infrastructure, which may not be an acceptable solution within some enterprises and definitely complicates configuration for SharePoint Administrators. If this is the case, there is another possible option which will allow Windows Phone 7 applications to interact with SharePoint as long as you have the ability to deploy a custom web service to the SharePoint Farm. In this post, we are going to create a custom SharePoint web service which allows Windows Phone 7 applications to authenticate to SharePoint without the need of UAG or FBA. We are then going to create a simple Windows Phone 7 application that demonstrates the usage of this service. The full source code for this post can be downloaded from the provided link. Read more: Custom SharePoint Authentication using Windows Phone 7