ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using the Role Manager

Instead of configuring authorization for particular users, you can group users into roles and assign authorization rules to the roles. For example, you might want to password-protect a section of your website so that only members of the Administrators role can access the pages in that section.

Like ASP.NET Membership, the Role Manager is built on the existing ASP.NET authentication framework. You configure role authorization rules by adding an authorization element to one or more web configuration files.

Furthermore, like ASP.NET Membership, the Role Manager uses the provider model. You can customize where role information is stored by configuring a particular Role provider.

The ASP.NET Framework includes three role providers: ...