So after long last, the .NET Standard version of SharePoint Online CSOM was released yesterday! The official announcement can be found here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blogs/net-standard-version-of-sharepoint-online-csom-apis/
![]()
![]()
And when I run the code, I am able to get the title of my SharePoint site back:
![]()
One of the key differences compared to the .NET Framework CSOM was that the authentication is completely independent of CSOM library now. Previously, there were native classes like SharePointOnlineCredentials which were used for auth, but they have been removed now.
Since .NET Standard CSOM now uses OAuth for authentication, it's up to the developer to get an access token and pass it along with the call to SharePoint Online. The CSOM library does not care how the access token was fetched.
So in this post,let's have a look at getting an Application authentication (aka App-Only) access token using MSAL.NET and use it with the new .NET Standard CSOM to get data from SharePoint Online.
When making app-only calls to SharePoint Online, we can either use an Azure AD app registration (with the Client Certificate) or we can use SharePoint App-Only authentication created via the AppRegNew.aspx and AppInv.aspx pages. (There are other workarounds available but that would be out of scope for this post) I go into more details about this in my previous post: Working with Application Permissions (App-Only Auth) in SharePoint Online and the Microsoft Graph
The recommended approach is to go with an Azure AD App Registration and the Client Certificate approach so that is what we will be using. To do that, first we will need to create an App Registration in the Azure AD portal and configure it with the Certificate, SPO API permissions etc. Here is a detailed walk-through on this in the Microsoft docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/solution-guidance/security-apponly-azuread
Let's have a look at a few important bits of my Azure AD app registration:
The certificate:
The consented SharePoint permissions:
Once the Azure AD App Registration is configured correctly, we can start looking at the code.
We will be using a .NET Core 3.1 Console app project for this along with the following nuget packages:
And finally, here is the code which uses MSAL.NET to get the access token and attaches it to the .NET Standard CSOM requests going to SharePoint:
Note: Make sure that you are using the right way to access the certificate as per your scenario. Here, for demo purposes, I have installed the certificate to my local machine and I am accessing it from there. In production scenarios, it's recommended to store the certificate in Azure Key Vault. More details here
Hope you found this post useful! I am very glad .NET CSOM Standard is finally available and we are able to use it .NET Core projects going forward. This is going to make things so much easier!