Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in CSharp and VB Opsylum

Introducing the Login Controls x 607
The beauty of the provider model is that you can swap providers through configuration without any
changes to your programming code. If you have your own custom data store, you could write your own
provider and plug it into your website to replace one of the default providers with very little effort.
Each provider needs a data store — represented by the bottom part of the diagram in Figure
16-1 — and is written to work with one or more specific data stores. For example, the
DefaultMembershipProvider (to handle membership services such as creating users, logging in,
and resetting passwords) and the DefaultRoleProvider (to handle role-related tasks) are designed
to work with any version of Microsoft SQL Server, including Express, LocalDB, SQL Server
Compact, and SQL Azure. These two providers replace the SqlMembershipProvider and the
SqlRoleProvider that shipped with earlier versions of ASP.NET.
In the remainder of this chapter, you see how to use the DefaultMembershipProvider and the
DefaultRoleProvider. In the next chapter, you work with the DefaultProfileProvider. You can
configure all three providers to use the same SQL Server database, making it easy to centralize all
your user data.
Ideally, you don’t deal with these providers directly. Under normal circumstances, the various providers
are configured for your website at a central location. You then use these providers by talking to
the application services. Although you could access these services directly from code, you often use
the ASP.NET built-in login controls to do the hard work for you. These controls are discussed next.
INTRODUCING THE LOGIN CONTROLS
The login controls that ship with ASP.NET 4.5 take away much of the complexity usually associated
with writing a security layer in a website. 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 enables new users to create an account and then log in. The section that follows then looks
at the seven login controls that ship with ASP.NET 4.5.
TRY IT OUT
Creating Login and Sign Up Pages
In this Try It Out, you extend the Login page that you created earlier. You also create a new page that
enables a user to sign up for an account on the Planet Wrox website.
1 . Open your website in VS and then open the Package Console Manager (choose Tools Í Library
Package Manager Í Package Manager Console).
2. Enter the following command at the Package Manager Console prompt and press Enter:
Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.Providers
By executing this package, VS downloads the providers, adds an assembly called System
.Web.Providers.dll to the Bin folder of your site and adds configuration information for the