My company is largely windows based and shares some internal applications (mostly written in .Net) through the Microsoft Information Server (MIS). One of the great features they have is that if you are logged into your windows session, the application automatically picks up your username and authenticates you into the application. This to me seems like some black magic of course. I would love to be able to mimic this behavior in my shiny applications if possible.
I have done a number of web searches but have fallen short on finding any resources (maybe I just was not looking in the right place?) which discuss this authentication at either a theoretical or practical level. I did see some discussions about web browsers being able to implement the NTLM protocol. This may be the core of the process that I was looking for, just not sure.
Can somebody here point me in the right direction for this type of feature. I realize some might suggest one of the pro packages, but I would like to keep this in the open source variant.