How to debug an ASP.Net application to access a secure OAuth API?

Question

I know that there must be an obvious solution to this problem, and I will skip it, so I would really like someone to enlighten me, so I do not rotate my wheels ...

I am writing an ASP.Net application that will interact with the service API (Evernote). Evernote requires OAuth for security, and before I can really interact with objects, I need to get a token.

The workflow is like this (explaining this to yourself, like everyone else!):

• Create a URL with my development api key and secret key and some other OAuth stuff, send it to Evernote to request an access token.
• Send the URL as an Evernote request and pull the new access token from the response
• Create another URL with an access token to request an authentication token for the user. This URL goes to the page that the user must interact with in order to log in (if it is not already specified), and then allow my application to access their account. The last url parameter I'm building is the callback URL that will be called from the Evernote servers.
• If all goes well, Evernote will request a callback URL and include a new authentication token as a parameter.
• As soon as my server receives a callback with a built-in token, I can use it so that my application can interact with user notes on subsequent requests.

The problem is that I am writing this application in a local field, and not in an Internet provider. So my callback refers to the localhost server. Of course, localhost is relative, so Evernote cannot resolve my callback ... I cannot ever receive an authentication token and debug at the same time.

There must be a problem with this problem, since this authentication model is not unique to Evernote (for a long shot ... Flickr uses it, like many other services). So can someone tell me how to configure things so that I can get the authentication token and still be able to debug my local mailbox?

Help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

OAuth is quite difficult to implement. This may not be the answer you are looking for, but I managed to do this work:

• Write the code on my local machine.
• Run the bat file (or, alternatively, fire the post-build event in VS), which triggers the deployment of the msbuild script and deploys the application to the test server.
• Run the application on the test server. After receiving the request token and the authorization request, it is redirected to the Evernote website.
• After successful authorization, the Evernote website is redirected back to my test server, and the authorization request token is exchanged for an access token.
• Instead of debugging (I don't have VS on the test server), I look through the application logs (the logging I used was as simple as writing to a text file).
• Rinse and repeat

For testing purposes, I registered a temporary public subdomain (e.g. test.oauth.mydomain.com) so that Evernote can redirect to this URL.

Answer 2

Accordingly ( How do I develop against OAuth locally? ) The callback is issued by the browser, so it should be able to hit localhost.