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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T02:43:16+00:00

I use Silverlight, .NET 4 (with VB), RIA Services, and I develop under VS

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I use Silverlight, .NET 4 (with VB), RIA Services, and I develop under VS 2010.
I’m trying to develop an application that allows SSO (Single Sign-On, i.e. automatic authentification on the application through Windows user name and Active Directory) and uses Forms authentication (to log against a DB if SSO fails), and this is where I have problems.

What I tried to do is:

  1. at application start-up, get Windows user name via a call to the server with RIA services (equivalent of a Web Service), which then returns the name found through the HTTP request (HttpContext.Current.Request.LogonUserIdentity.Name). Why such a costly call ? Because Windows user name just can’t be accessed on client side, as other stack overflow topics will show you…

  2. then try to log the user found against the Active Directory: this part is ok.

Part 1 works on local (I indeed have something like “DOMAIN\USER”, but this is because the dev Web server runs on my machine), but when the application is deployed on a remote server it no longer works (I then have “SERVICE NT\NETWORK” which I cannot use).

Do you know how I could get rid of this big issue ? Here are my 1st tracks:

  • manage to get user name on client side (but from what I could read that would be a miracle; even using javascript on the default ASP.NET page I couldn’t)
  • use NTLM .NET authentification mechanism
  • configure IIS or the server used (Windows Server 2008) so that I receive on server side a good “DOMAIN\USER” (maybe via trust settings…?)
  • use Windows Authentication, but how could I also validate users against the DB then ?

Thanks for your help, this is driving me nuts… Moreover this is becoming urgent too 🙁

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, the only way I found was to get user via javascript and ActiveX control:

    var wshshell = new ActiveXObject("wscript.shell");
var username = "UserID=" + wshshell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%username%");

    Of course this raises deployment issues since:

    • all your users must use I.E.
    • they must set I.E. parameters to allow ActiveX

    I was lucky since 1st point was specifically mentionned, for point 2 I used a .reg file to be executed on all computers, couldn’t find better.

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