WebAuthenticationBroker is a component of Windows 10 which facilitates Oauth authentication with services from a client app. It handles the presentation and navigation of the authentication pages and returns control to your app along with a returned token or an error code. It’s a UWP API and integrates neatly with modern apps, however what may not be obvious is that it doesn’t use the Edge browser like a WebView control but instead uses the legacy Internet Explorer browser.
This is a problem because it’s old and a bit creaky and some sites don’t work with it, or actively refuse to – one of these is GitHub. If you try to authenticate with GitHub using it you’ll see a big ugly banner asking you to use a modern browser and you’ll be stuck. Hopefully this will change and the API will move to Edge (or even Chromium powered Edge which is on the horizon). However in the mean time you’ll need to roll your own solution. There are lots of ways you could do this by using the WebView control in your app and handling navigation events but I thought I’d try and recreate the same API so that I had a solution I could swap in without major changes. The result of this work is called, and excuse me it was very late when I thought of it, Authful. The full code is online in GitHub here. I haven’t released it as a NuGet library and won’t unless there is sufficient interest as I thought people might just prefer the code so that they can customise the look and feel for their own apps. There is a sample project to show how to call the API (hint: It’s the same as the UWP class). It doesn’t support the advanced options but it should work with most mainstream OAuth-based APIs.
In The Hand Ltd 