Client application login using httprequest - asp.net

Question

I am a bit new to ASP.NET and web development, and I am still confused about the following :
On the one hand I have a very complete ASP.NET MVC website based on NopCommerce that includes login, registration, e-commerce features, forums, etc.
On the other hand, I have a Windows Forms client application that needs to read and write data from and to my website database.
The first thing I would need to do is to allow users to login in the client application by sending a request to the server. I've been looking around the web for days and I can't manage to find a precise and secure way to do so.
I'm pretty much sure that I have to use System.Net.Http to make a request from the client. Will this request then got to be handled by a MVC controller action ? Maybe an already existing one ?
Here is the method I have so far, based on a tutorial found online (it is not complete at all) :
private static async void PostRequest(string addressPost)
{
IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, string>> queries = new List<KeyValuePair<string, string>>()
{
new KeyValuePair<string, string>("Query1", "Email"),
new KeyValuePair<string, string>("Query2", "Password")
};
HttpContent formContent = new FormUrlEncodedContent(queries);
using (HttpClient client = new HttpClient())
{
using (HttpResponseMessage response = await client.PostAsync(addressPost, formContent))
{
using (HttpContent content = response.Content)
{
string myContent = await content.ReadAsStringAsync();
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(myContent);
}
}
}
}
Any existing example or help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

first we need to focus on the architecture of the application, we have here two applications, 1) web application, 2) WinForm application. and you want to share the same db for both, here are the drawbacks of doing so, you might found yourself one day your winform will lock a table because of updating etc, and your web application will lose access, thats not a good idea,
here is how i would do it.
create a web api plugin for your web application, and use api tokens for security, there is some available web api plugin for nopcommerce but its limited in functionality, so i guess you will have to add some methods based on your needs, next thing you will do is have your winform application communicate with your webapi, in that case your winform works independently and secure,
as a side note, you can have in your web api multiple tokens for each user if you want, you can manage that in your web api plugin, just make a table where you will store that info with user info and tokens for everyone and you can manage that from the web admin.