SilverlightTM 4 Problem — Design — Solution

Chapter 3. Sign Me Up

Using Membership, Authentication, and Profile Services in Silverlight

In the previous chapter, I covered many of the new technologies available for Silverlight development. The solution section offered some choices as to which technologies to use during the development of the FitnessTrackerPlus application. Now you will finally see some of the technologies in action as you begin to implement the actual site. It is always best to leverage as many existing services as possible when creating a new site and ASP.NET has offered several services to facilitate common website tasks such as login, registration, and profile management. Even though you will be developing a Silverlight application, you can still take advantage of the services that are provided by ASP.NET rather than reinventing the wheel. By the end of this chapter, you will have a good working knowledge of how to combine the existing ASP.NET services for Authentication, Membership, and Profile management with the new WCF RIA Services to create a fully working login, and member registration area.

In addition to providing some of these common services to your users, it is also important that this site functions like a traditional website as much as possible. This site should provide integration with the browsers back and forward buttons as well as browser history. In this chapter, you see how the new navigation framework provides you with the tools necessary to ensure that the user experience on this Silverlight ...