Authenticating .NET CSOM in SharePoint Online

The process of authenticating the .NET Client Object Model in SharePoint Online has been greatly simplified in the 2013 version. Earlier (2010), you had to go through a lot of steps for doing the exact same thing. You  had to open a web browser instance, force the user to enter the credentials in the browser and then grab that  cookie from Internet Explorer and pass it to the .NET CSOM. If you are interested, the code of the old authentication method can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjohnson/archive/2011/05/03/authentication-with-sharepoint-online-and-the-client-side-object-model.aspx

Fortunately in the 2013 version, the process is a lot simplified by the introduction of the SharePointOnlineCredentials class. This class is part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll itself so you don't have to include an extra assembly in your application. All you have to do is pass an instance of the SharePointOnlineCredentials class to the ClientContext.Credentials property. The SharePointOnlineCredentials takes in two parameters which are your Login Email for your Office 365 SharePoint site and your password in the SecureString format.

You can grab all the required SharePoint 2013 client assemblies from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35585

For this particular demo, you will need to reference the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll assemblies in your project.

 The code is as follows: