Provide login support for settings sync

[RMacfarlane]

With work on settings sync (#2743), there needs to be a login mechanism to sync to a specific account.

[zackschuster]

will this support cloudkit?

[RMacfarlane]

@zackschuster Initial support will be for Azure Active Directory only

[sanket-bhalerao]

Is this going to be "Login using Github" option to login?
if that is the case, then is there a possibility to have all extensions (from Microsoft) can be logged in in a single login? no need to have a separate login and access request for extensions.

• github
• github issues
• vscode live share
• *settings sync

[RMacfarlane]

@sanket-bhalerao For the initial implementation for settings sync, no. The backend we've currently written for setting sync accepts Azure Active Directory access tokens. But we do want to make it possible for other extensions to be able to use the same login data. I've written up an API proposal here which I'm working on using for this. This would make it possible to write other extensions that provide authentication. The plan with it is to write two different extensions, one contributing AAD auth that would be used by settings sync and built in to VSCode, and one for GitHub that other GitHub extensions could depend on for authentication

[IllusionMH]

To clarify: It will be possible to use outlook.com account (not sure if its AAD under the hood for non org users) or it will be available only to org users?

[RMacfarlane]

Yes, our intention is to allow outlook.com/personal accounts. My understanding is that these accounts may not be in AAD itself, but the AAD login endpoint is able to federate to a service that handles such accounts

[RMacfarlane]

There's an initial implementation of this now being used by settings sync that allows logging in with a Microsoft account (any work/school/personal account):

With the authentication provider API introduced to create this, I'll be working on creating a GitHub authentication extension that could be leveraged by other extensions as well. (It's possible we'll use GitHub sign in for settings sync in the future, TBD.)

There's still some work to do on how to best display login information, I'll create a separate issue to track that.