Membership

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the Membership API, which is new in ASP.NET 2.0. The membership API provides you with a full-fledged infrastructure for managing users of your application. You can use either the WAT, the new security controls, or the Membership API for accessing these base services. Membership itself is provider based. In other words, you can exchange the underlying store by changing the underlying provider without touching your application. In this chapter you used only SQL Server as a provider. In Chapter 26 you will learn the necessary details for creating and configuring a custom Membership provider. In the next chapter, you’ll look at a different approach of validating user identity—Windows authentication.