Mapping as network location in Windows Explorer?

[softworkz]

Hi,

is it possible with this solution to map the WebDav share in Windows Explorer via "Add network location" while authenticating with Azure AD (Entra ID)?

Thanks

[ITHitBuild]

Yes, you can implement any authentication required in your project, including Entra ID, Basic, Digest, NTLM, Kerberos, cookies, OAuth2 or any custom authentication.

Our Engine itself does not contain any authentication or authorization code, except two helper methods, AuthenticateAsync() and IsAuthenticatedAsync() that you can override to keep your authentication calls in one place. All authentication code is provided as part of our examples.

Please see this article about how to implement authentication: https://www.userfilesystem.com/programming/win/auth/

You can find an example with authentication implementation in our WebDAV Drive example here: https://github.com/ITHit/UserFileSystemSamples/blob/5668f5085e4c088d639b8d7da7fbbac5f841cc06/Windows/WebDAVDrive/WebDAVDrive/VirtualEngine.cs#L247

Entra ID authentication typically requires displaying web browser to authenticate a user. You can do this using two different approaches: displaying a dialog from your application with a web browser control in it or opening external web browser and capturing authentication info using listener, running inside your application. In both cases you will extract authentication token (or cookie) from your server response and attach it to your requests to the server.

Our WebDAV Drive sample currently demonstrates the first approach as more simple and universal.

[ITHitBuild]

Just to clarify. Add Network Location does not support Entra ID as far as I know.

[softworkz]

Just to clarify. Add Network Location does not support Entra ID as far as I know.

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. The latter is really unfortunate, I had hoped that WebDAV could be an alternative for providing users a shared drive in Explorer since Azure Files SMB shares don't work with user authentication either unless you have a Windows domain (either on premises or AZ Domain Services). Letting all users connect with the same access key it not really an option.
Unfortunately, installation of a drive software is also not an option. I think it's gotta be web based only.
Thanks again!

[ITHitBuild]

Just in case, Add Network Location supports Basic, Digest, NTLM and Kerberos. If your WebDAV implements one of these auth schemes, you do not need to deploy the client software.

[softworkz]

Yeah, but none of these work for authenticating with Entra unless you have a Windows domain and the users are originating from that domain, i.e. even when I would set up a domain controller it wouldn't help because users cannot be synced from Entry back to the domain, only in the other direction. The remaining option would be Azure Domain Services, but the pricing doesn't fit when this is the only purpose to use it for. Also many users are freelancers and we can't domain-join their machines anyway.