ASP.NET 2.0 Illustrated

11. Security and Membership

ASP.NET contains a range of features that make it easy to create areas of a Web site or Web application that are not universally available to anonymous visitors. This is a common requirement in many sites—perhaps an area where you provide premium content that you want to charge people to view or download, or where you simply want to monitor who is accessing that area of the site. While this has long been part of Web sites created in all kinds of programming and scripting languages, ASP.NET removes the need to create and maintain the basic code and processes that this requires. Instead, a set of intelligent server controls and built-in request handling features do most of the groundwork and simplify development.

Once ...