I finally stuck my toe in the deep end of the distributed architecture pool – WSE2 to the rescue

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out how to pass info from one managed application to another that is in a separate process. I’m thinking of all of the tools that I know how to work with and none of them make me happy. The information is user information as I have the user login to one app and then that app starts up another app in a separate process – but I don’t want the user to have to log in again.

I started thinking about this over the weekend and mentioned the problem in this post, thinking that it was just because I have limited knowledge, but the solution was probably just out of my reach, yet common knowledge to many others.

Some of the paths my brain has gone down…

 – persist the info – using some type of encryption, temporarily write the info into a file and then read that file from the second process. I dno’t like this because I come up with way too many what-ifs.

– pass the info as args within the startprocessinfoclass. No way. Too easy for someone to then start up the 2nd app on their own without credentials.

– pass the login and password as args and then force the new app to quickly re-authenticate the user. No – I have no clue how secure or inaccessible the command line args are.

– get a securitycontexttoken within the first app (that is already doing wse2) and pass it to the 2nd app. Hmmmm… that could work – although since my client won’t have x509 certs on the server (don’t ask, please!) this won’t be as easy as I would like.

However, I think that this last thing is going to be my best chance. Hooray WSE2.

Now to figure out how to accomplish this. Oh – it is never ending…

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