Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

15.2. Introducing the Login Controls

The login controls that ship with ASP.NET 3.5 take away much of the complexity usually associated with writing a security layer in a web application. The available login controls effectively encapsulate all the code and logic you need to validate and manage users. These controls work by communicating with the configured provider through the application services, instead of talking to a database directly. To see how this works, the following exercise shows you how to create a simple Login and Sign Up page that allows a new user to create an account and then log in. The section that follows then looks at the seven login controls.

Try It Out: Creating Login and Sign Up Pages In this exercise you finish the Login page that you created in Chapter 6. You also create a new page that allows a user to sign up for an account on the Planet Wrox web site. Open up the page Login.aspx that you created in Chapter 6 from the root of the site and switch it to Design View. Drag a LoginStatus control from the Login category of the Toolbox and drop it in the page. Next, drag a Login control and drop it on the LoginStatus, so it ends up right above it. Both controls are visible in Figure 15-2 (the LoginStatus appears as a small Login link below the Login control). Figure 15-2. Figure 15-2 Open the Properties Grid for the Login control and set the two properties shown ...