I can tell you right from the start. That’s how it’s done! They are an example for me… a role model for any company. They have a simple product (I can do what they do with phpmail) but they added buck loads of content arround the tool, lots of expertise an intuitive tool and boy they’re cheap.

Some of the hightlights of the product:

• Lots of integrations right “out the box”: Twitter, facebook, Google Analytics and so forth.
• Lots of interfaces: Ipad app, Iphone app, email beamer (send a campain right from your outlook) and etc.
• Completely free if you have under 2000 subscribers.
• Really interesting reports, almost like a mailmarketing BI!
• Lots of killer features.

So if you’re serious on sending mailmarketing I suggest you go pro with mailchimp!

See you next time!

Today I’m going to talk about Google Accounts, OpenID and my new challenge.

I’m now working as It Consultant specialized in developing solutions that integrates my client (in this case, my company webAula) with big market players like Google, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and so forth.

When you think of integrating your product to another one, the first thing that comes into play is Identity sharing, Single Sign-on and stuff and there is the job for OpenID Protocol.

In OpenId protocol there are 2 actors: The Identity provider and the Relaying Partner.

The part of Identity Provider (IP) is to hold and protect your information. You have to choose one identity provider (at the most) to hold all your personal information needed online. In this article I’ll be using Google Accounts as IP.

The part of Relaying Partner (RP) is to Rely (dah) on Identity Provider and know how to “talk” to it, and check if the identity is OK.

A great Ryan Boyd talk on Google IO 2011 (it’s 1h long, but it worth it).

Fortunately you don’t have to go through all the trouble of implementing all the protocol in order to set up an RP in your application as there is lot’s of libraries available to you. I my case I’ll use DotNetOpenAuth, free available to you. As a matter of fact you can become a Identity Provider with this library but that is not our case.

First of all you have to include DotNetOpenAuth.dll (downloaded from the above link) as a reference to your project.

Then, in the page that you handle the login process of your application you have to include the library:

using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId;
using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.RelyingParty;
using DotNetOpenAuth.OpenId.Extensions.AttributeExchange;

Then you create a static object for the relaying party and set up the discoveryServices (I’ll assume that your page is called “Default” and your :

//relaying Partner
private static readonly OpenIdRelyingParty relyingParty;

static _Default()
{
  HostMetaDiscoveryService googleAppsDiscovery =new HostMetaDiscoveryService

  {
       UseGoogleHostedHostMeta = true,
  };
  relyingParty = new OpenIdRelyingParty();
  relyingParty.DiscoveryServices.Insert(0, googleAppsDiscovery);
}

In your Page_Load you add a handler for the AuthResponse:

IAuthenticationResponse authResponse = relyingParty.GetResponse();

And you can create switch to handle the status of the AuthResponse:

if (authResponse != null)
{
    switch (authResponse.Status)
    {
        case AuthenticationStatus.Authenticated:
//SOME LOGIC
//

        break;
        case AuthenticationStatus.Canceled:

And so forth…

If the AuthRespose is null it means that this request to your page is not the return of your identity provider so you have to send them your request for authentication and you can do it like this:

IAuthenticationRequest request = relyingParty.CreateRequest(domain);
sendGoogleRequest(request);

private void sendGoogleRequest(IAuthenticationRequest request)
{

    FetchRequest fetch = new FetchRequest();
    fetch.Attributes.Add(new AttributeRequest(WellKnownAttributes.Contact.Email, true));
    fetch.Attributes.Add(new AttributeRequest(WellKnownAttributes.Name.First, true));
    fetch.Attributes.Add(new AttributeRequest(WellKnownAttributes.Name.Last, true));
    request.AddExtension(fetch)

    request.RedirectToProvider();

}

It’s important to retrieve the “domain” of the user. In my case it’ll be a parameter of my system.I’ll only allow integration to one Google Apps domain, but you can let the user inform that for you in some form. Just remember to add a validator with some code like this:

protected void openidValidator_ServerValidate(object source, ServerValidateEventArgs args)
{
    // This catches common typos that result in an invalid OpenID Identifier.
    args.IsValid = Identifier.IsValid(args.Value);
}

This way you can catch elegantly the return of DotNetOpenAuth telling the there was a typo with the domain name, for instance (No endpoint found error).

It’s also a good practice you wrap the process of creating a authRequest in a method so you can grab a protocol exception that might occur:

        private void createLoginRequest(string domain)
        {
            try
            {
                IAuthenticationRequest request = relyingParty.CreateRequest(domain);
                sendGoogleRequest(request);
            }
            catch (DotNetOpenAuth.Messaging.ProtocolException ex)
            {
                loginFailedLabel.Text = ex.Message;
            }
        }

Finally you can grab user details (up there in the beginning of your class) when we were looking on the AuthRequest status:

case AuthenticationStatus.Authenticated:
    FetchResponse fetch = authResponse.GetExtension<FetchResponse>();
    if (fetch != null)
    {
        Session["email"] = fetch.GetAttributeValue(WellKnownAttributes.Contact.Email);
        Session["firstName"] = fetch.GetAttributeValue(WellKnownAttributes.Name.First);
        Session["lastName"] = fetch.GetAttributeValue(WellKnownAttributes.Name.Last);
    }

    FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(fetch.GetAttributeValue(WellKnownAttributes.Name.First), true);
    Response.Redirect("/privateSite/",true);

As my friend, Bugs Bunny says: “That’s all folks”.

See you latter.

Everyone will tell you that these are lightning-fast times, that we’re working on problems everyday and taking time to provide some kind feedback is a luxury that most people doesn’t have, but I’ll positively tell you that this is precisely when feedback came into play to give you a big helping hand.

If you feed someone with information of WHAT you are doing, you probably will have to explain no further. For instance, yesterday I had a problem with our Datacenter provider, they had a broken optic fibre (!!) so our bandwidth was really limited and because of that our DNS wasn’t able to fulfill most of requests.

I’ve contacted my bosses and told them that I had already verified everything that I was responsible for and how big was the problem that our provider had. They asked a few questions and then they went crazy on our provider. Their focus went on who could provide some information or fix to the problem.

That’s why we HAVE to give feedbacks to everyone. Even something like “I’m working on it, give me a couple of hours” is enough to let people know that you`re in fact working on their problem. That’s a big deal!

Hope that you had enjoyed. Please rate and comment on it.

Can you relate to this post in any way? Do you agree? Disagree? Please let me know.

See you next time!

So, from now on, all of my posts will be in english but the focus will be the same, IT problems, the way I see things and probably some tech tips also.

I think that this enterprise will help me a lot and hopefully it will help you too.

Thanks for reading and hang on for next post.