Authorizing requests in a self-hosting context

Earlier in this book, we've been illustrating how SignalR can be hosted in a traditional Windows process, thanks to the self-hosting support provided. While this opens up several new and interesting scenarios, on the other end this is a much more basic infrastructure, and we might therefore lose useful or necessary features exposed by the ASP.NET environment. In some cases, we might even need to learn about some manual steps that we have to perform in order to gain access to equivalent functionalities.

This is the case for the authentication process, which needs different additional steps according to the specific authentication scheme used. Our goal is to illustrate the point, and therefore we'll stick with the simplest case, represented again by Windows Authentication. The key part here is that it is definitely possible to support several other authentication mechanisms; although, for those, we might need to get our hands dirty by digging into...