Application Development Using Visual Basic® and .NET

Forms-Based Authentication

The previous discussion is relevant for intranets or other scenarios where users will have Windows user accounts on the servers or domains. Furthermore, Windows Integrated Security does not work across firewalls or proxies. For public Web sites, we need another approach.

The alternative approach is to bring up a login form to authenticate the user. We will look at two of the several approaches possible within .NET to login forms. The FormsBasedAuthentication example uses the .NET Forms-Authentication class and the web.config file.

Forms Authentication and Authorization

.NET Forms-based authentication uses the application's web.config file, a login form, and an optional cookie to authenticate the user. Typically, in ...