Notes on using Microsoft Graph SDK to manage users in an Azure AD B2C tenant.

I recently worked on migration users’ accounts in an existing SQL database to azure AD B2C. I found some helpful articles from Microsoft that document different migration approaches and offer example codes on using Microsoft Graph SDK to manage the users. You can find the links to these articles and sample projects in the References section.

For the most part, I did not have much troubles with the basic CRUD operations. However, I had a bit of difficulties working with custom attributes and retrieving a user by email. In this post, I’m going to share some tips and caveats I learned. In particular, I’ll discuss:

• The Microsoft Graph API permissions you need to manage the users.
• Caveat on UserPrincipalName attribute and retrieving a user by email.
• Setting and retrieving custom attributes in Azure ADB2C.

The file is damaged and could not be repaired.

I want to share this familiar but cryptic error I experienced when opening certain PDFs which were streamed from a Java web application.

Integrate Azure AD B2C profile editing user flow in angular using oidc-client-js.

This post is a continuation of the blog post I wrote a couple months ago on how to authenticate user against Azure ADB2C from angular app using oidc-client-js. In that post, I discussed how to integrate AD B2C sign up and sign in flows to allow the user to authenticate against AD B2C. In this post, I’m going to show an example of integrating the editing profile user flow. You can find the accompanying sample project here.

I assume you have some basic understanding of angular and Rxjs and focus primarily on the aspects relating to integrating the edit user flow. If you have questions about the codes, feel free to reach out.

Also, check out the next post relating to oidc-client-js in which I go over handling password reset.

Connect to Oracle database from .NET core application.

In this post, I go over using Oracle .NET core libraries to connect to Oracle database. In particular, we’ll look at the Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Core and the Oracle.EntityFrameworkCore.

Using OAuth2 Client Credentials grant type in Azure ADB2C

In the past, I worked on a project in which we had had to registered applications in both regular azure AD and azure ADB2C tenants just because OAuth2 Client Credentials grant type was not supported in Azure ADB2C. However, I recently learned that it is now possible to use the grant type to obtain an access token for an app in azure ADB2C.

Continue reading

Building or leveraging an OIDC provider to protect web applications.

In this post, I write about OpenID and OAuth2 providers, and what can you use to build or leverage them to protect your web applications.

Automatically build and deploy .NET core 3 console application as a Windows service

In this post, I want to share an example of using Azure Devops to automatically build and deploy a .NET console application as a windows service to run on a Windows VM.

About integrated windows authentication and how to implement it in ASP.NET core running on IIS.

In this post, I share what I have learned about integrated windows authentication and how to enable it in a web application which consists of an angular front-end and ASP.NET core 3 backend.

How to resolve “An exception was forcibly closed by the remote host” in a .NET app running on an azure VM behind a load balancer.

I get the error “An exception was forcibly closed by the remote host” occasionally at work. This is an I.O exception and happens when a HTTP request fails to reach the destination host. To troubleshoot, I often ping or tracert the destination IP/URL, and the error usually comes down to the firewall restricting the connection, and goes away once we have updated the firewall to handle the connection. However, another instance when I get this error is when my app that runs on an azure VM of a load balancer tries to send a request to another app which has a DNS that points to the same load balancer.

How to retrieve connection strings in azure key vault from ASP.NET using configuration builders, XML transformation and azure devops.

Configuration builders are mechanisms to retrieve connection strings from external sources. Using configuration builders, you may not have to do much codings besides installing packages and providing XML configurations for connecting to popular sources. In this post, I share with you my experience in using configuration builders for .NET to securely retrieve connection strings from an azure key vault. I’ll go over the setup and share some of the issues I face while integrating my app with azure key vault.