Getting Current User information in Silverlight 4

Let’s assume for a Silverlight application. You may be wondering where to find out who the current user is. In ASP.NET there is a User property on the Page object (also other places such as the HttpContext.Current), but where is that in Silverlight 4 (not in early versions that I am aware of). The answer is the WebContext.

I think the WebContext was introduced in Silverlight 4.You The WebContext is created in the constructor of the App class that is in the App.xaml.cs file. If it isn’t you may be using a different type of Silverlight 4 project than the Silverlight Business Application or Silverlight Navigation Application. If you app doesn’t have this, I am assuming you can add it. Just create on of these projects and copy what is done there.

Among other things, the WebContext has a User property. This gives you what acts like what you may expect if you are accustomed to ASP.NET. For example, it has a Roles property to see what roles the user in. It has a IsUserInRole() method to see if a user is in a particular role. It has a Name property that gives you the username.

The WebContext is accessible from code by using WebContext and is also added to the Application Resources in the Application_Startup method which makes it accessible via XAML. To show the current username using XAML you would do something like the following:

<TextBlock x:Name="CurrentUser" Text="{Binding Current.User.Name, Source={StaticResource WebContext}}" />

Using XAML is really great because as Current.User changes from null to some value when the user logs in or Windows Authentication logs them in automatically, the TextBlock will be notified and display the change.

. The same is NOT true if you use code that you may write in ASP.NET to set the value. For example:

Assume you XAML is now defined like this:

<TextBlock x:Name="CurrentUser" />

You might be tempted to write the following line of code

CurrentUser.Text = WebContext.Current.User.Name;

The problem is that WebContext.Current.User may be null initially AND the biggest problem is that you won’t be able to pick up the Name since it may NOT be set yet. Really what we want is to using Bindings which notify the other side of the binding when the value changes. This means that initially we would get no username, but as soon as it is loaded we would be notified that there is a new value and we can show it.

The code is a little more complex than above, but not really too bad. Basically, we are trying to do what we did in XAML in the first example, but do it in code. Here is all you have to do:

CurrentUser.SetBinding(TextBlock.TextProperty, WebContext.Current.CreateOneWayBinding("User.Name"));

Now we the CurrentUser textblock will always display the current value of WebContext.Current.User.Name even as it changes.