Hot Chocolate VS IdentityServer

have a look here https://youtu.be/qrh97hToWpM https://chillicream.com/

There are some libraries which allows you to declare some class with more or less arbitrary methods which will be called by it at runtime. I believe many of them do that in optimal way, not just using usual reflection. One of the examples is HotChocolate library https://github.com/ChilliCream/hotchocolate . You declare class with arbitrary methods which contain arbitrary arguments. "Arbitrary" doesn mean arbitrary at all, but if parameter type is registered in DI or marked by specific attribute, it can be passed to the method.

At work we are considering using GraphQL to build our read-only data-APIs using .NET 6, EF Core and SQL Server. Looking at the ecosystem the most relevant plattforms seems to be graphql-dotnet and ChilliCream.

I'm starting a brand new project. Looks like if we want to do GraphQL in .NET, it's either graphql-dotnet or Hot Chocolate. Both look pretty good on paper.

If you know it better: Please try statically typed generated graphql queries in C# (like write the graphql queries, have a graphql schema, then get generated C# types which resemble the query, the only thing I've found that could do it was https://chillicream.com/docs/strawberryshake and there I quickly hit this bug with super simple queries containing unions: https://github.com/ChilliCream/hotchocolate/issues/4662

If you don't know Hot Chocolate framework, feel free to read about it on chillicream.com (official website) and feel free to join the great community (which is always willing to help) on slack

I love using Hot Chocolate in C# ❤

Hotchocolate GraphQL server. This is the most advanced server for a .Net environment. This article does not go into the basics and assumes some framework knowledge.

I think for the time being that's the case, yeah. I'm confirming with the great people over at https://github.com/ChilliCream/hotchocolate to see if we can somehow work around that.

Its deprecated in favor of Duende Identityserver which introduced a license model.

Tokens usually have a lifetime and they are separate from the user's authentication principals like username and password. Unless you are rolling your own form of token provider (not something that would be recommended) the token creation is handled for you. Take a look at https://identityserver4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ or if your organization makes under 1M in income a year the free version of what Identity Server progressed into https://duendesoftware.com/products/identityserver

I think Duende (Identity Server) handled the situation pretty well.

https://duendesoftware.com/products/identityserver

> Standard License Pricing

Thanks for your message. No, the idea was not to re-implement OAuth nor OpenID stuff. What I had in mind for the authentication thingy was something like this: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/sanctum. If we want to go the OAuth/OpenID way, in .NET we have this one: https://github.com/DuendeSoftware/IdentityServer.

> As you said, there are plenty of local options that you only need to run.

I think managed databases are a good analogy here. While I might run my own PostgreSQL/MariaDB instance, many out there won't be overjoyed at the idea of actually needing to run and manage the damned thing, as well as set up some kind of alerting and handling the need to eventually scale it up.

> It also has the largest risk of compromise and data leaking from any service you may use...

PII is definitely a big concern, even if something like password hashes aren't too useful on their own (provided that they're salted), though in cases like that it might actually make a lot of sense to utilize a widely used and tested solution that's specialized for this particular use case.

In many cases, thousands of people across the globe will be able to develop something and squash any bugs in it better than you might be able to do individually or with your own team, though there might be a few exceptions out there. Auth is probably not one of the cases where you want to write code without a lot of eyes on it.

> ...the largest amount of potential lock-in...

This is debatable: standards like OAuth2 and OIDC technically make many of the solutions and libraries way more pluggable and make it easier to choose between various implementations, depending on your needs.

Of course, something like Keycloak also has its own API (as do many of the cloud offerings) so if you build too much automation around a particular implementation, then that advantage partially goes out the window.

> ...and the least need for integration.

I'm not sure about this, it probably depends on your architecture. If you have a monolithic web app, then you probably don't need a separate turnkey/SaaS solution, whereas if you have an ever growing number of services, whilst you want to manage authentication and accounts against all of them centrally, then something like Keycloak (or one of the cloud alternatives) become way more lucrative.

That said, I'd still opt for self-hostable options whenever possible, albeit I also don't trust cloud based password managers and such, preferring something like KeePass instead. I've probably just come to a different conclusion in regards to usability/responsibility/features/security than some other people.

Sadly, there aren't that many good options out there at the moment, apart from Keycloak. For example, IdentityServer is promising, but went in a commercial direction: https://duendesoftware.com/products/identityserver#pricing

He's referring to IdentityServer 3/4, which was open sourced, and was not owned by Microsoft. That 3rd party is commercializing their work (and to be fair, it's a lot of work) as https://duendesoftware.com/products/identityserver , and has a different commercial licensing model.

https://github.com/DuendeSoftware/IdentityServer/blob/main/L... does not seem to square with any definition of "open source" I'm familiar with, and that goes double for having an in-repo file that just says "read this unversioned pdf on some other site"

I would not recommend it. There is a server named Duende identity server which you can host locally.