by Peter Daukintis

Next up is getting the authentication service to use azure table storage.

To do this you need to get the additional azure code samples from here http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples and include the asp providers project into the solution (this will need to be up converted as the project is for vs2008). Then include a reference to this in the host website project.

For my scenario, where I am not running my app as a cloud service, I need to add settings to my web.config file to provide settings for the various providers. It was quite challenging to work out what exactly was required here but I got things working with the following in my web.config:

    <membership defaultProvider="TableStorageMembershipProvider" userIsOnlineTimeWindow = "20">
      <providers>
        <clear/>

        <add name="TableStorageMembershipProvider"
             type="Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.AspProviders.TableStorageMembershipProvider"
             description="Membership provider using table storage"
             enablePasswordRetrieval="false"
             enablePasswordReset="true"
             requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"
             minRequiredPasswordLength="1"
             minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0"
             requiresUniqueEmail="true"
             passwordFormat="Clear"
             applicationName="YourAppName"
             accountName="youracctname"
             sharedKey="xxxxxx"
             allowInsecureRemoteEndpoints="true"
             tableServiceBaseUri="http://youracctname.table.core.windows.net/"
                />

      </providers>
    </membership>
    <roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="TableStorageRoleProvider" cacheRolesInCookie="true" cookieName=".ASPXROLES" cookieTimeout="30"
                     cookiePath="/" cookieRequireSSL="false" cookieSlidingExpiration = "true"
                     cookieProtection="All" >
      <providers>
        <clear/>
        <add name="TableStorageRoleProvider"
             type="Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.AspProviders.TableStorageRoleProvider"
             description="Role provider using table storage"
             allowInsecureRemoteEndpoints="true"
             applicationName="YourAppName"
             accountName="youracctname"
             sharedKey="xxxxxx"
             tableServiceBaseUri="http://youracctname.table.core.windows.net/"
                />
      </providers>
    </roleManager>
    <sessionState mode="Custom" customProvider="TableStorageSessionStateProvider">
      <providers>
        <clear />
        <add name="TableStorageSessionStateProvider"
             type="Microsoft.Samples.ServiceHosting.AspProviders.TableStorageSessionStateProvider"
             allowInsecureRemoteEndpoints="true"
             applicationName="YourAppName"
             accountName="youracctname"
             sharedKey="xxxxxx"
             tableServiceBaseUri="http://youracctname.table.core.windows.net/"
             blobServiceBaseUri="http://youracctname.blob.core.windows.net/"
             />
      </providers>
    </sessionState>

I struggled a bit to get this to work but changing the passwordFormat to Clear made everything work so I have assumed that there’s a bug with the Hashed passwords currently.

By the way, I used this tool http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/ with great success for confirming whether data was being written/read correctly and whether the tables were being created successfully.