Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Security, Membership, and Role Management with C# and VB

Chapter 17. Membership and Role Management in ASP.NET AJAX 3.5

Membership and role management have been included since the days of ASP.NET 2.0. These features, among others, are based on the ASP.NET provider model discussed in Chapter 10. The ASP.NET membership feature enables you to manage users and validate their credentials against a data store of your choice. The ASP.NET role management feature provides an easy way to implement role management in a web application to authorize users and manage their roles. As mentioned several times throughout this book, the ASP.NET 3.5 runtime is based in its core on the ASP.NET 2.0 runtime and hence ASP.NET 3.5 inherits all the features included in the ASP.NET 2.0 and adds to them new features, modifications, and improvements, including ASP.NET AJAX.

ASP.NET AJAX that ships with the .NET Framework 3.5 contains web services that act as an interface to the ASP.NET application services. These services have to be enabled in your application and once enabled the authentication and role services will be accessible from the client-side (that is, the browser side where JavaScript code is running).

This chapter covers the topics of membership and role management and their integration with ASP.NET AJAX that ships as an integrated part of ASP.NET 3.5 and the .NET Framework 3.5. After reading this chapter, you will have a good knowledge of the following:

• How to enable membership management in a web application (Chapter 11 includes a detailed discussion ...