Why membership provider is not generic?

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+1 Q:

Why membership provider is not generic?

I have to confess that I hate membership provider. The default implementation is not very appropriate normally and I haven't seen so far a good implementation of a custom membership provider, probably because this is not possible :-)

So the question is:

In your opinion: which are the reasons for not having membership/role provider as a generic class? I mean, why Microsoft didn't select this approach.

EDIT

Reading the answer I realized that maybe it wasn't clear enough that I'm talking about MembershipProvider and RoleProvider. NOT about the core authentication mechanism of ASP NET.

+3 A:

The most obvious reasons that come to mind are:

The default classes are sufficient for most purposes (mainly: user management, authentication, and permission checks);
The system is already extensible through inheritance (implement IPrincipal).
The membership system was designed for the .NET 1.1 Framework, before generics were available.

Aaronaught 2010-04-10 22:20:23

@Aaronaught: Thanks for your answer. Membership provider's methods returns a MembershipUser instance. if you want to return something else, you have to inherits from this class and cast it outside. No method return an interface :-(

Timmy O' Tool 2010-04-10 22:26:55

@Timmy: Perhaps you should read some of the documentation. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480476.aspx

Aaronaught 2010-04-10 22:32:11

@Aaronaught: Thanks again. How that documentation is connected with MembershipProvider?

Timmy O' Tool 2010-04-10 22:52:56

@Timmy: Scroll down to `FormsAuthenticationModule` where it explains how to use the `IPrincipal` interface. There's a whole architecture here, `MembershipProvider` isn't supposed to be used in isolation.

Aaronaught 2010-04-10 23:27:00

@Downvoter: I'd love to hear the explanation for *this* downvote.

Aaronaught 2010-04-10 23:27:42

FYI: If you need more information on implementing `IPrincipal`, there's a tutorial here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa302401

Aaronaught 2010-04-10 23:43:37

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