Adrian Hall

Adrian Hall

Microsoft Program Manager by day; Mobile Developer by night

Recent posts

Tailwind Photos: Registration (The Backend Resources)

September 03, 2019  13 minute read  

Over the last five blog posts, I’ve incorporated various social media authentication mechanisms and worked on silent authentication so that the user only ever has to log in once; if the user is logged in, they won’t ever see a sign in prompt. However, dealing with three distinct authentication mechanisms is not ideal. What happens when I add a fourth authentication type, or decide to do something custom like a username and password? Every time I use a new authentication scheme, my backend ...

Tailwind Photos: Silent Login

August 23, 2019  8 minute read  

Thus far in our story, we’ve covered Facebook, Google, and Microsoft authentication. There is one more to do - Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t have a nice vendor-provided SDK to do the work. In fact, Twitter is fairly hostile to app developers, so I decided to forego the Twitter login (sorry!). Instead, I’m going to cover the changes I made to support silent login. Up until now, everything has been in “managers” - one for each authentication provider. This has done all the work ...

Tailwind Photos: Microsoft Login

August 21, 2019  5 minute read  

Today, I am continuing with the authentication story for my app - Tailwind Photos - and tackling Microsoft authentication. The story so far: The Splash Screen Facebook Login Google Login You will see a lot of the same techniques as previous methods - just updated for todays topic. Let’s get started! The bright side of todays topic is that, with a few twists, you can use this same code if your app targets enterprise users. There is a point in the configuration where you need to s...

Tailwind Photos: Google Login

August 19, 2019  7 minute read  

Thus far in this series, I’ve established a decent splash screen and auth trigger page, and integrated Facebook authentication into my app. The next authentication technique is Google Auth. If you followed along with the Facebook auth integration, you will know that I separated the actual Facebook part of it into a separate class, allowing me to clean up the code in the actual activity. I also established provider-agnostic models for the authenticated user, which I will re-use in this post...

Tailwind Photos: Facebook Login

August 17, 2019  9 minute read  

In my last post on Tailwind Photos, I set up the splash screen and the buttons I want to use for signing in to the app - social media buttons for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. In this article, I’m going to go through the process of authenticating Facebook. The Facebook side of things All social media companies have their own methods for setting up authentication, and Facebook is no different. The instructions I have here are correct as of writing, but you should realize the ai...