Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

5.2. ASP.NET Application Services

ASP.NET AJAX provides a client framework that simplifies JavaScript development, but as you have seen, it also provides server-focused solutions for easily accessing Web services and localizing script resources. In addition, ASP.NET AJAX makes it easy to leverage the user authentication, roles, and profile management features of ASP.NET.

Authentication and role services allow you to remotely check user credentials in JavaScript against a central user repository. ASP.NET provides a default database and authentication scheme that you can use. The profile service allows you to store and retrieve data for each authenticated user on the server. ASP.NET AJAX makes this information available from JavaScript running in the browser.

5.2.1. Authentication Service

ASP.NET Forms Authentication allows you to store user credentials in a database or other back end without creating individual Windows accounts for every user. ASP.NET AJAX makes it possible to authenticate users against the server storage directly from JavaScript in the browser.

First, Forms Authentication must be enabled for the application that requires credentials using the authentication section under system.web in the application configuration file. The following configuration data from a web.config file shows setting the authentication mode to Forms and defining that cookies should be used to store the authentication ticket. ASP.NET supports carrying the authentication ticket in the URL ...