How validate usernames/passwords against WP’s database?

Before WordPress 2.5 passwords were simply hashed with md5.

WP 2.5 introduced phpass, where a password gets hashed and salted several times, in order to be safe against rainbow tables. A littel Googling on phpass and dotnet revealed this post http://davebeer.com/posts/migrating-wordpress-users-to-dotnet/ briefly describing a how to migrating WP users to dotnet.