Professional DotNetNuke®5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET

Chapter 9. Member Role

In December 2004, Microsoft made available its ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype. This was distributed as an SDK which, when used by a developer in a project, makes reference to an assembly named MemberRole.dll. Microsoft defines it as "a collection of classes and sample scripts that allows a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile." MemberRole.dll was simply a backport of a series of classes, from the then ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 Framework, compiled under the 1.1 Framework. This backported version conforms to the same API as is found in ASP.NET 2.0.

Just before releasing the SDK, Microsoft informed the DotNetNuke Core Team of its intentions with this backport. The Core Team discussed the pros and cons of taking advantage of the backport and, after much debate, decided to implement it at that time, using the backport, rather than waiting eleven months to prepare for a future upgrade of DotNetNuke to the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. When it was time to upgrade to the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework with DotNetNuke's 4.0 release, the upgrade task was made less complicated by this decision. The majority of the changes required replacing the DLL reference with a reference to the new classes within the 2.0 framework.

Other factors that weighed in this decision included what MemberRole.dll offered in addition to the easier migration path. In adapting MemberRole.dll, DotNetNuke was also preparing ...