Adding external authentication with a Microsoft account

Today, we are going to add external authentication to our website, enabling us to restrict some features to logged in users. As we don’t want to manage users and passwords ourselves, we will utilize other authentication services, such as Microsoft Live/Account, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Today, we will setup the infrastructure and connect to the Microsoft account, and then next week, show how to connect to Google, Twitter and Facebook too.

Upgrading to .Net Core 2.2

Before we start to add the authentication code, we are quickly going to upgrade to .Net Core 2.2, from 2.1. This was surprisingly easy for us – perhaps because of our automated testing. We didn’t have to update any code, except for the compatibility line in startup.cs in our web service and web site. This also gave us an opportunity to upgrade all of the NuGet packages to their latest versions. The automated tests…