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copied!<p>Web services, such as those created by WCF, are often best used in a "stateless" way, so each call to a Web service starts afresh. This simplifies the server code, as there's no need to have a "session" that recalls the state of the client. It also simplifies the client code as there's no need to hold tickets, cookies, or other geegaws that assume something about the state of the server.</p> <p>Creating two services in the way that is described introduces statefulness. The client is either "authenticated" or "not authenticated", and the MyDataService.svc has to figure out which. </p> <p>As it happens, I've found WCF to work well when the membership provider is used to authenticate <em>every</em> call to a service. So, in the example given, you'd want to add the membership provider authentication gubbins to the service configuration for MyDataService, and not have a separate authentication service at all.</p> <p>For details, see the MSDN article <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731049.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>.</p> <p>[What's very attractive about this to me, as I'm lazy, is that this is entirely declarative. I simply scatter the right configuration entries for my MembershipProvider in the app.config for the application and! bingo! all calls to every contract in the service are authenticated.]</p> <p>It's fair to note that this is not going to be particularly quick. If you're using SQL Server for your authentication database you'll have at least one, perhaps two stored procedure calls per service call. In many cases (especially for HTTP bindings) the overhead of the service call itself will be greater; if not, consider rolling your own implementation of a membership provider that caches authentication requests.</p> <p>One thing that this <em>doesn't</em> give is the ability to provide a "login" capability. For that, you can either provide an (authenticated!) service contract that does nothing (other than raise a fault if the authentication fails), or you can use the membership provider service as described in the original referenced article.</p>

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