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Sign in users in a sample WPF desktop application

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This guide uses a sample Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application to show you how to add authentication to a WPF desktop application. The sample application enables users to sign in and sign out. The sample desktop application uses Microsoft Authentication Library for .NET for .NET to handle authentication.

Prerequisites

Register the desktop app

To enable your application to sign in users with Microsoft Entra, Microsoft Entra External ID must be made aware of the application you create. The app registration establishes a trust relationship between the app and Microsoft Entra. When you register an application, External ID generates a unique identifier known as an Application (client) ID, a value used to identify your app when creating authentication requests.

The following steps show you how to register your app in the Microsoft Entra admin center:

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least an Application Developer.

  2. If you have access to multiple tenants, use the Settings icon in the top menu to switch to your external tenant from the Directories + subscriptions menu.

  3. Browse to Identity >Applications > App registrations.

  4. Select + New registration.

  5. In the Register an application page that appears;

    1. Enter a meaningful application Name that is displayed to users of the app, for example ciam-client-app.
    2. Under Supported account types, select Accounts in this organizational directory only.

  6. Select Register.

  7. The application's Overview pane displays upon successful registration. Record the Application (client) ID to be used in your application source code.

Specify your app platform

To specify your app type to your app registration, follow these steps:

  1. Under Manage, select Authentication.
  2. On the Platform configurations page, select Add a platform, and then select Mobile and desktop applications option.
  3. In the input field under Custom redirect URI, manually enter https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient, then select Configure. If you select this URI on the select box, you may get a redirect URI error.

Grant API permissions

Since this app signs in users, add delegated permissions:

  1. From the App registrations page, select the application that you created (such as ciam-client-app) to open its Overview page.

  2. Under Manage, select API permissions.

  3. Under Configured permissions, select Add a permission.

  4. Select Microsoft APIs tab.

  5. Under Commonly used Microsoft APIs section, select Microsoft Graph.

  6. Select Delegated permissions option.

  7. Under Select permissions section, search for and select both openid and offline_access permissions.

  8. Select the Add permissions button.

  9. At this point, you've assigned the permissions correctly. However, since the tenant is a customer's tenant, the consumer users themselves can't consent to these permissions. You as the admin must consent to these permissions on behalf of all the users in the tenant:

    1. Select Grant admin consent for <your tenant name>, then select Yes.
    2. Select Refresh, then verify that Granted for <your tenant name> appears under Status for both scopes.

Create a user flow

Follow these steps to create a user flow a customer can use to sign in or sign up for an application.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft Entra admin center as at least an External ID User Flow Administrator.

  2. If you have access to multiple tenants, use the Settings icon in the top menu to switch to your external tenant from the Directories + subscriptions menu.

  3. Browse to Identity > External Identities > User flows.

  4. Select + New user flow.

  5. On the Create page:

    1. Enter a Name for the user flow, such as SignInSignUpSample.

    2. In the Identity providers list, select Email Accounts. This identity provider allows users to sign-in or sign-up using their email address.

      Note

      Additional identity providers will be listed here only after you set up federation with them. For example, if you set up federation with Google or Facebook, you'll be able to select those additional identity providers here.

    3. Under Email accounts, you can select one of the two options. For this tutorial, select Email with password.

      • Email with password: Allows new users to sign up and sign in using an email address as the sign-in name and a password as their first factor credential.
      • Email one-time-passcode: Allows new users to sign up and sign in using an email address as the sign-in name and email one-time passcode as their first factor credential. Email one-time passcode must be enabled at the tenant level (All Identity Providers > Email One-time-passcode) for this option to be available at the user flow level.

    4. Under User attributes, choose the attributes you want to collect from the user upon sign-up. By selecting Show more, you can choose attributes and claims for Country/Region, Display Name, and Postal Code. Select OK. (Users are only prompted for attributes when they sign up for the first time.)

  6. Select Create. The new user flow appears in the User flows list. If necessary, refresh the page.

To enable self-service password reset, use the steps in Enable self-service password reset article.

Associate the WPF application with the user flow

Although many applications can be associated with your user flow, a single application can only be associated with one user flow. A user flow allows configuration of the user experience for specific applications. For example, you can configure a user flow that requires users to sign in or sign up with email address.

  1. On the sidebar menu, select Identity.

  2. Select External Identities, then User flows.

  3. In the User flows page, select the User flow name you created earlier, for example, SignInSignUpSample.

  4. Under Use, select Applications.

  5. Select Add application.

  6. Select the application from the list such as ciam-client-app or use the search box to find the application, and then select it.

  7. Choose Select.

Clone or download sample WPF application

To obtain the sample application, you can either clone it from GitHub or download it as a .zip file.

  • To clone the sample, open a command prompt and navigate to where you wish to create the project, and enter the following command:

    git clone https://github.com/Azure-Samples/ms-identity-ciam-dotnet-tutorial.git

  • Download the .zip file. Extract it to a file path where the length of the name is fewer than 260 characters.

Configure the sample WPF app

  1. Open the project in your IDE (like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code) to configure the code.

  2. In your code editor, open the appsettings.json file in the ms-identity-ciam-dotnet-tutorial > 1-Authentication > 5-sign-in-dotnet-wpf folder.

  3. Replace Enter_the_Application_Id_Here with the Application (client) ID of the app you registered earlier.

  4. Replace Enter_the_Tenant_Subdomain_Here with the Directory (tenant) subdomain. For example, if your primary domain is contoso.onmicrosoft.com, replace Enter_the_Tenant_Subdomain_Here with contoso. If you don't have your primary domain, learn how to read tenant details.

Run and test sample WPF desktop app

  1. Open a console window, and change to the directory that contains the WPF desktop sample app:

    cd 1-Authentication\5-sign-in-dotnet-wpf

  2. In your terminal, run the app by running the following command:

    dotnet run

  3. After you launch the sample, you should see a window with a Sign-In button. Select the Sign-In button.

    Screenshot of sign-in screen for a WPF desktop application.

  4. On the sign-in page, enter your account email address. If you don't have an account, select No account? Create one, which starts the sign-up flow. Follow through this flow to create a new account and sign in.

  5. Once you sign in, you'll see a screen displaying successful sign-in and basic information about your user account stored in the retrieved token.

    Screenshot of successful sign-in for desktop WPF app.

How it works

The main configuration for the public client application is handled within the App.xaml.cs file. A PublicClientApplication is initialized along with a cache for storing access tokens. The application will first check whether there's a cached token that can be used to sign the user in. If there's no cached token, the user will be prompted to provide credentials and sign-in. Upon signing-out, the cache is cleared of all accounts and all corresponding access tokens.

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