HOWTO: Sharepoint and CustomAuth, Part 1 - Soliciting Questions

I have been getting a bunch of private requests from many people asking me variations of the following questions:

"I want to use Sharepoint, but I want user authentication to be done with CustomAuth [or their own Wildcard Application Mapping ISAPI DLL]. I have tried many things, but it does not seem to work. Can you help me?"

"I want to write an ISAPI Filter to capture URL/Username information during a Sharepoint request execution. It seems that Sharepoint's stsfltr.dll is doing some magic and stealing the request and information from me. Can you help?"

You know I cannot resist a good challenge, especially when I get the same sort of feedback from many different people. :-)

I now have some good contacts inside the Sharepoint team, so I can finally figure out what their ISAPI DLL is doing from the inside, and combined with knowing IIS and ISAPI, I am going to attempt to put to rest as many of the common Sharepoint-IIS integration questions that you may have.

So, what am I doing now?

Call to Action

Yup, I am going to start up a little series of blog entries devoted to the topic of Sharepoint-IIS integration... and I am hereby soliciting *YOU* for your favorite questions in this space. Feel free to ask your questions as comments or to agree with others; I take that as input as to what to focus on.

I think it is time to take this discussion public in a "Forum" sort of format on my blog so that everyone who has similar questions can simply gather here and benefit.

Because, you know, private email responses are not searchable by anyone and benefit very few people, and it takes me just as much effort... so I would rather help more people. :-)

I already have a Virtual Machine set up with Windows Server 2003 SP1, I have access to all the Sharepoint versions you can name, and I've got CustomAuth, source code, and debuggers attached and waiting...

//David